


























































































































































Cofyright N?_i 


COPYRIGHT deposit. 


& 































































































. 










































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































. 

1 






























































\ 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians. 





















































































■ 




















. 


























love Stories 

of Famous Virginians 

BY 

Sally Nelson robins 

n 

Author of “Scuffles,” “A Man’s Reach,” Etc. 

National Historian Colonial Dames of America , 
and 

Second Vice-President 
Colonial Dames of America in the 
State of Virginia. 



PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF 

The National Society Colonial Dames of America 
in the State of Virginia. 



RICHMOND, VA.: 

Press of The Dietz Printing Co. 
1923 


Cor t^^ 



Copyrighted, 1923 

BY 


The Colonial Dames of Americ 
in the State of Virginia 



A TRIBUTE 


TO THE DEVOTION AND GENEROSITY 
OF 

\zxxvtt Cxjx 

PRESIDENT 

NATIONAL SOCIETY COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA 
IN THE STATE OF VIRGINIA 
AND 

HONORARY PRESIDENT 
NATIONAL SOCIETY COLONIAL DAMES 


OF AMERICA 




FOREWORD. 


A LL the world loves a lover. No matter what a man does, he 
must, also, love dynamically, to be absolutely satisfying. 
L Indeed so fascinating is a man’s love that one almost meas¬ 
ures him by the fire of it. To him who loves much, much is 
forgiven. 

Patriotism and Patriots hold the center of the stage now; and 
there may be a few who will fancy to read of the peculiar romances 
of The First President of these United States, The Author of the 
Bill-of-Rights, The Most Brilliant Representative of Congress of 
His Day, The Progenitor of Martha Washington, The Picturesque 
Leader of the Horse-Shoe Knights, The Most Graceful American 
Writer of the Eighteenth Century, and last, but never least, the 
tender love-story of Chief-Justice Marshall. 

Old letters, manuscripts, and diaries have been searched for this 
material, which, I trust, may appeal to all lovers of lovers. 


The Author. 



Contents. 


George Washington: The Lover 1. 15 

George Washington: The Lover II. 35 

Thomas Jefferson: The Lover. 51 

George Mason: The Lover. 61 

John Marshall: The Lover. 73 

James Madison: The Lover. 87 

John Randolph: The Lover. 99 

Alexander Spotswood: The Lover. 107 

William Byrd: The Lover. 119 

Cyrus Griffin: The Lover. 133 

John Custis: The Lover. 145 













Illustrations 


George Washington .opp. page 15 

Old Entrance, Mount Vernon. 34 

Martha Custis.opp. page 35 

Washington Arms . 47 

Thomas Jefferson .opp. page 51 

George Mason .opp. page 61 

John Marshall (Silhouette).opp. page 73 

Marshall House. 84 

Dolly Madison.opp. page 87 

John Randolph . opp. page 99 

Maria Ward . opp. page 104 

Alexander Spotswood .opp. page 107 

Lucy Parke .opp. page 119 

Gate at Westover. 130 

Village Street, Yorktown. 141 

















George Washington: The Lover. 




George Washington: The Lover. 

I. 


S TRANGE, maybe, but we cannot exactly visualize George 
Washington as a lover. We see the tall, gaunt boy plunging 
through untrodden wildernesses with his engineering zeal; we 
see a younger boy swimming the Rappahannock from Ferry Farm 
to Fredericksburg; we see the young soldier and the great soldier 
in buff and blue; the hero of American Independence, the Father 
of our country. 

We can see his color rise in the presence of the proud Lord Fair¬ 
fax, when, in 1747, that nobleman, whose patronage of the awkward 
boy is now his chief distinction, bad him fare forth on that famous 
Valley Survey; we can feel his dumb nervousness when he made his 
first appearance in the House of Burgesses; we can ^ee his agitation 
over the mellifluous compliments of the elegant and courteous Mr. 
Speaker Robinson, and imagine his relief when Mr. Speaker’s tact¬ 
ful words, which have become an American classic, fell on his be¬ 
wildered senses, “Sit down, Mr. Washington, your modesty equals 
your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language I 
possess!” We can hear him sigh with relief as he did sit down, and 
the business of the House distracted its attention from him. 

We see his cool defiance of a savage foe. In our eyes he towers 
above his compeers in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia 
in 1774, when our prophet, Patrick Henry, casually remarked, “If 
you speak of solid information, and sound judgment, George 
Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on this floor.” We 
know him as a great military leader, majestic President, cordial 
host, thrifty farmer, and considerate husband, but—a lover? It 
does not seem compatible with his other marvelous characteristics. 
If he was a lover, then a minuet lover, with his hand on his heart 
and his noble head bent low, it seems to us. 



16 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Yet we are told he loved often and unhappily, and once unwisely, 
most unwisely, and that little indiscretion of his historic heart is, 
by far, the most interesting of his several romances. 

George Washington’s noble and impressive physiognomy is not 
that of a lover; his wide, firm mouth does not suggest sweet and 
inconsequent whisperings. Could his large, steady eyes ever have 
rolled in “wild frenzy?” We never heard that he could sing, and 
his poetic energy seems to have ended with an acrostic, at fifteen, 
on the name of Frances Alexander. His gigantic stature which 
gave so magnificently to portraiture and statuary, to leadership 
and battle, would, to us, be a trifle out of place prone at the feet 
of a fair eighteenth century siren. 

Moreover, his wonderful reserve, divine endowment for his 
unique and imperative career, must intercept and check the senti¬ 
mental effusiveness of his time. His attitude to his mother was 
ever formal and respectful. What did he call her ? Certainly not 
“mama” even when he, in the interest of picturesque history, used 
his little hatchet on the cherry tree, always, we suspect, “mother” 
or “madam.” 

We are told that at one moment of his exceeding glory he, 
decked with the insignia of success, hastened to speak to Mary 
Washington of his achievement. “Pull off those things,” she 
pleaded, “for I cannot talk to you with them on.” Again a courier 
dashed to Fredericksburg to bring her news of a great victory— 
she was busy in her garden. 

At once a breathless crowd gathered around the garden where 
stands the courier bareheaded, with the papers in his hand. Mary 
Washington goes on planting peas. The crowd, eager, impatient, 
cries, “Open it, open it and read the news!” 

Even the courier ventures to speak: “Madam Washington, the 
people are wild for news; please break the seal!” 

She goes on with her planting till the row is finished; then 
receives the dispatch quietly, reads it slowly, and without emotion 
remarks, “George was apt to succeed in whatever he undertook,” 
undisturbed by the cheers of the people, she proceeded to plant 
the next row of peas. 

Again when the Marquis de LaFayette came to Fredericksburg 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


17 


to congratulate her upon the genius of her fine son, she accepted 
his enthusiasm with: “I am not surprised at what George has done, 
for he was always a good boy.” 

This calm restraint of the mother was the heritage of the son, 
and the “grand passion” in him, from the beginning, was almost 
too formal and deliberate to be thrillingly convincing—until we 
read his letters to Sarah Fairfax. 

Frances Alexander, of the memorial acrostic, was his first 
recorded “love.” She happened when he was fifteen. If we knew 
more, perhaps, we should have a boyish idyl, fresh and quaint 
enough to create a pastel of sentiment in the early life of our first 
gentleman. Alas, we only know her name. Parents she must have 
had, but their identity is buried in the dust of two centuries. They 
might have had a fascinating home on the Potomac or the Rappa¬ 
hannock and a garden in which Frances blushed like the roses, and 
young George stammered the first syllables of irresistible and 
innocent desire. 

What form and semblance had this Frances Alexander, who in 
the early eighteenth century inspired the boy of unspeakable 
destiny to pen an acrostic, which alone attests his earliest affair? 
Was she tall or chubby, fair as a lily, or dark and colorful as a 
“red, red rose?” Did she respond to his stumbling, bashful senti¬ 
ment? Did a too early death break up the tender romance? Or 
did she laugh him to scorn, in her prim parlor, or in her garden 
of old-fashioned blossoms, as only a girl of fourteen might do ? 

Mary Newton Stanard discovered the acrostic, and from her 
“Colonial Virginia,” I copy two lines: 

Xerxes wasn’t free from Cupid’s Dart 
And all the greatest heroes felt the smart. 

Did the young George feel his coming glory, his great heroship 
at this early age? 

So poor little Frances must not only go the way of all flesh, but 
also the way of the majority of romances, rejoicing in the fact 
that the greatest personality of our young history indited his 
only poetical effusion to her child-self. 


18 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


At sixteen Washington seemed entirely to have forgotten the 
heroine of the acrostic, and the myth of the “Low Land Beauty” 
was inscribed on the pages of history and romance. I say myth, 
advisedly, for it is not known, really, who this “Low Land Beauty” 
is; but whoever she is, or was, could tradition have given any 
lass a more euphonious or attractive name ? 

Was this “Low Land Beauty” Betsy Fauntleroy or Lucy 
Grymes ? Both of these young gentlewomen are candidates for the 
unique and interesting distinction. Far different from the uncer¬ 
tainty of the first love, Frances, is the clarity of the social position 
and parentage of these two Tidewater belles. 

“Betsy” is a descendant of that Moore Fauntleroy, of Richmond 
county, who about the middle of the seventeenth century took up 
a certain tract of land, extending from the Rappahannock to the 
Potomac and lying on Rappahannock creek and other creeks and 
bounds named. Moore was temperamental, and so perhaps was 
Betsy. He was suspended from the House of Burgesses for con¬ 
tempt, and took a high hand with the Indians; he seized and bound 
the various chiefs of tribes and held them till they came over to 
his way of thinking. 

William, the grandson of Moore, erected and enjoyed the fine 
estate “Naylor’s Hole,” relics of which are still preserved by 
descendants, and became the father of Elizabeth, familiarly called 
Betsy. We should not wonder if Betsy went in a smarter set than 
did the young Washington; he was certainly good enough, but 
there were some in those far-off pro-aristocratic days, who thought 
themselves, at least, smarter. George Washington wrote this letter 
to William Fauntleroy in 1752: 

Sir: (rather defiant?) I should have been down long ago; but my busi¬ 
ness in Fredericksburg detained me, and I was taken with a violent pleurisy, 
but propose as soon as I recover my strength to wait on Miss Betsy in hopes 
of the revocation of the former cruel sentence and see if I can meet with 
any alteration in my favor. I have enclosed a letter to her, which should be 
much obliged to you for the delivery of it. 

Betsy would not have young Washington. She had many suitors 
and tradition has her pretty and charming and exceedingly 
coquettish. She married Bowler Cocke, master of Bremo on the 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


19 


James, at the same time rejecting Thomas Adams. Adams went to 
England. Virginia was not big enough for him and Bowler Cocke, 
and there he stayed till the latter died. He then returned to Vir¬ 
ginia, wooed and wedded Betsy and they lived a serene life. There 
were Cocke children and many descendants of Washington’s sweet¬ 
heart live in Virginia and elsewhere today. So endeth the second 
lesson of romantic Washington. The other “Low Land Beauty,” 
Lucy Grymes, lived in Richmond county, too, at the estate called 
“Morattico.” She was daughter of Charles Grymes and grand¬ 
daughter of John Grymes of Grymesby in Middlesex, situate upon 
the Plankatank “where the bullfrog leaps from bank to bank.” 
Lucy and George were kinfolk, of no great “remove,” as Virginia 
kinship goes. Both were descended from old Speaker Warner, of 
Warner Hall, in Gloucester, one of the most beautiful of colonial 
mansions. But Lucy, again, would have none of George! 

She married Henry Lee, of Leesylvania in Prince William coun¬ 
ty (better match at that time, I daresay), and became the happy 
mother of sons and daughters. Henry Lee was fourth in descent 
from that first, enterprising Richard, who became the progenitor of 
the famous Lees of Virginia. 

In 1748 Washington wrote a letter to “Sally.” He candidly re¬ 
marks in this letter: “I am almost discouraged from writing to 
you, as this is the fourth since I received any from yourself. I 
pass the time much more agreeably than I imagined I should, as 
there is a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house where 
I reside that in a great measure cheats sorrow and dejectedness, 
though not so as to draw my thoughts altogether from your parts.” 

Note the cool and practical restraint of his announcements. 
Where is the fire, the sentimental rage, so to speak of John Ran¬ 
dolph, the impassioned lover? The agreeable young lady, referred 
to is the sister-in-law of his host, Lord Fairfax, of Belvoir, from 
which place he also writes to: “Dear Robin (probably, his cousin, 
Robert Washington, of Chotank). My place of residence at 
present is at his lordship’s, where I might, were my heart dis¬ 
engaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there is a very agreeable 
young lady in the same house”—(not a ravishingly beautiful and 
irresistibly fascinating young lady, mark, but simply very agree- 


20 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


able)—“Colonel George Fairfax’s wife’s sister, but that only adds 
fuel to the fire, as being often and unavoidably in company with 
her revises my former passion for your ‘Low Land Beauty.’ 
Whereas, were I to live more retired from young women I might 
in some measure alleviate my sorrow by burying that chaste and 
troublesome passion in oblivion, and I am very well assured that 
this will be the only antidote or remedy.” 

Chaste but troublesome—absolutely Washingtonianesque! 

Evidently, a young lady stole Washington’s snuffbox, as silly 
youths at times purloin a feminine handkerchief, for his friend, 
Robert Carter Nicholas, writes to him in 1756 in unrestrained glee: 
“The snuffbox was properly returned and I took the liberty of 
communicating the Extatick paragraph of your letter: What 
blushes and confusion it produced I shall leave you to guess.” If 
we but could transcribe that “Extatick paragraph.” We have 
failed to find it yet, and can only take the word of Mr. Nicholas. 

No more of Betsy Fauntleroy or Lucy Grymes ! The next tradi¬ 
tion is Mary Cary, the sister of Mrs. George Fairfax, referred to 
in the letter above, but it was only an imitation sentiment, we 
conclude, for Mrs. George Fairfax was the fullflowered passion 
of George Washington’s maturity. She was Sarah or Sally Cary, 
of Ceelys, on the James, daughter of the wealthy and influential 
Wilson Cary and Sarah Pate, daughter of Colonel John Pate, of 
Poropotank, in Gloucester, at whose house the rebel, Nathaniel 
Bacon, died. 

In 1757 the next romance of George Washington is dimly flashed 
on the screen of history. This time the young lady is the proud 
Mary Philipse, whom he met on a visit to her brother-in-law, 
Beverly Robinson, of New York. We have seen her picture; it 
is handsome, in a large, imperial way. The most we know of this 
fifth, and not very serious inoculation, is from two letters from 
Joseph Chew to George Washington. In the first he remarks: 

Pretty Miss Polly is in the same condition and situation as you saw her. 
In the second: I have often had the pleasure of breakfasting with the 
charming Polly. Roger Morris was there—don’t be startled—but not 
always. You know him; he is a lady’s man; always something to say; the 
town talks of it as a sure and settled affair. I can’t say I think so, or that 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


21 


I doubt it, but assure you had little talk with Mr. Morris and only slightly 
hinted it to Miss Polly; but how can you be excused to continue in Philadel¬ 
phia? I think I should have made a kind of flying march of it if it had 
been only to see whether the works were sufficient to withstand a big attack 
—you a soldier and a lover! Mind, I have been arguing for my own 
interest now, for had you taken this method I should have sure had the 
pleasure of seeing you. I will be setting out tomorrow for New York, 
where I will not be wanting to let Miss Polly know the sincere regard a 
friend of mine has for her, and I am sure if she had my eyes to see through 
she would prefer him to all others. 

Between the lines we read that Washington did not desire Mary 
Philipse very, very much; but although she did marry Roger 
Morris, she did not permit the legend of Washington’s affection 
for her to die. How far it went we cannot say, but history has 
forever hallowed the name of Mary Philipse by connecting it with 
Washington’s. 

Sarah Cary Fairfax was the grand passion of Washington’s life. 
A married woman? Yes, but his, remember, were chaste, if 
troublesome experiences. 

Sarah exchanged the luxuries of Ceelys for the splendor of 
Belvoir on the Potomac. Anne Fairfax, the sister of George, had 
married Lawrence Washington, of Mount Vernon, and Washing¬ 
ton was frequently with his half-brother at that place. 

There is an old story that long before Sally Cary became Mrs. 
Fairfax, George Washington became so infatuated with her that he 
boldly went to Ceelys and asked her father for her hand. “No!” 
thundered the wealthy aristocrat, “If that is your mission, here, sir, 
you may as well order your horse. My daughter has been accus¬ 
tomed to her coach and six.” 

But the flame smouldered on and on, and perhaps was never 
extinguished even to the day of Washington’s death. After Sally 
married Fairfax, Washington was frequently at Belvoir and Mrs. 
Fairfax became his patron and instructress in the fine arts of 
courtesy and good breeding, while her brain, in its strength and 
flowering, matched his. She rounded the angles of this sturdy, 
remarkable young man, and gave him the rare opportunity of 
mingling with the essence of refinement and culture. 

She enmeshed him with her charm and beauty, and while his 


22 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


affection was for her, as he has it, was chaste, it was, probably, no 
less troublesome. Again his congenital and marvelous restraint 
kept him absolutely from the semblance of mischief. I consider 
his early romances but zephyrs to this one crimson whirlwind, 
passion of his life. 

In September, 1758, he writes to her from camp. “I should think 
our time more agreeably spent believe me, in playing a part in 
Cato with the company you mention and myself doubly happy in 
being the Iuba to such a Marcia as you make.” 

Sally Fairfax acted with discretion, and fended herself from 
anything like a declaration. In 1755 he writes to her: 

Dear Madam: When I had the happiness to see you last you press’d 
an inclination to be informed of my safe arrival in camp with the charge 
that was entrusted to my care, but at the same time desired it might be 
communicated in a letter to somebody of your acquaintance. This I took 
as a gentle rebuke and a polite manner of forbidding my correspondence 
with you; and I conceive this opinion is not illy founded when I reflect 
that I have hitherto found it impracticable to engage one moment of your 
attention. If I am right in this I hope you will excuse the present pre¬ 
sumption and lay the imputation to elateness at my successful arrival. If 
on the contrary, these are fearful apprehensions only, how easy is it to 
remove my suspicions, enliven my spirits and make me happier than the 
day is long by honoring me with a correspondence which you did partly 
promise to do. Please make my compliments to Miss Hannah, etc. I am, 
madam, your most obedient and humble servant, G. Washington. 

Time went on; Washington held his passion in with bit and 
bridle; he saw the magnificent gentlewoman whom he loved, freely. 
There seems to have been not the least suspicion on the part of her 
husband of Washington’s attitude toward her. She was inspiring 
him with the consideration of literature, the elegancies of life, the 
great career for which God had destined him; nothing coarse, 
nothing reckless between them, but the passion of a hero had 
concentrated on a woman that he could never possess. 

He went on his prudent, innocent, inoffensive, reserved way, 
till, at the most inopportune moment for expression, he told Sally 
Fairfax all. The dam of his emotions suddenly and unexpectedly 
broke, and the torrent of his feeling poured, foaming into the ear 
of the most exalted and virtuous of her sex. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


23 


It was just four months before his marriage to Martha Custis 
(we can scarcely believe it), that he felt himself powerless to be 
prudent any longer. The following letter is the incontrovertible 
witness in the case, and is the one evidence we have of the im¬ 
passioned recklessness of the austere Washington. It is great to 
know that he was human enough to love in such a way; that he 
was strong enough to conceal his true feeling, till it was to him 
the blessed privilege of her he loved to know it. The greatest 
tribute he could pay her was to tell her all. Here is the compromis¬ 
ing but noble letter: 

Dear Madam: Yesterday I was honored with your short but very 
agreeable favor of the first inst. How joyfully I catch the happy occasion 
of renewing a correspondence which I fear’d was disrelish’d on your part; 
I leave to time, that never failing expositor of all things, and to monitor 
equally as faithful in my own breast, to testifie. In silence I now express 
my joy. Silence which in some cases—I wish the present—speaks more 
intelligibly than the sweetest eloquence. If you allow that any honor 
can be deriv’d from my opposition to our present system of management, 
you destroy the merit of it entirely in me by attributing my anxiety to the 
animating prospect of possessing Mrs. Custis, when I need not name it, 
guess yourself, should not my own honor and country’s welfare be the 
incitement. ’Tis true I profess myself a votary to love. I acknowledge that 
lady is in the case, and, further, I confess that this lady is known to you. 
Yes, madam, as well as she is to one who is too sensible of her charms to 
deny the power whose influence he feels and must ever submit to. I feel 
the force of her amiable beauties in recollection of a thousand passages 
that I would wish to obliterate till I am bid to revive them; but experience, 
alas, sadly reminds me how impossible this is and evinces an opinion which 
I have long entertained that there is a destiny which has the sovereign 
controul of our actions not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of human 
nature. You have drawn me, dear madam, or rather I have drawn myself 
into an honest confession of a simple fact. Misconstrue not my meaning, 
’tis obvious; doubt it not, nor expose it. The world has no business to 
know the object of my love declared in this manner to you when I want to 
conceal it. One thing above all things in this world I wish to know, and 
only one person of your acquaintance can solve me that or guess my mean¬ 
ing ; but adieu to this till happier times, if ever I shall see them; the hours 
at present are melancholy dull; neither the toils of war nor the gentler 
conflicts of A. B.’s is my choice. I dare believe you are happy as you say. 
I wish I was happy also. 


24 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Through all the fervor and surprise of her Washington experi¬ 
ence Mrs. Fairfax was discreet ; there is no record of the slightest 
deviation from the most rigid interpretation of her marital code. 
Certainly so far as anybody can tell at this late day, Washington 
did all the talking. His former affairs were but flimsy showers, 
gently falling on a restrained and calculating nature, to the tor¬ 
rential storm which swept prudence away and bared his big heart 
to the wife of George Fairfax. 

One visualizes her as a prismatic iceberg on which the rays of 
his passion fell very colorful and beautiful, but by no means 
capable of melting, in the least degree, the high standard of 
matrimonial virtue which the proud Sarah had set for herself. 
The letter transcribed in a former paper was written at Fort Cum¬ 
berland September 12, 1758. The old saying goes “as hot as love 
in August” our first gentlemen certainly found it most uncomfort¬ 
able in the first half of this sultry September. In this letter he 
writes: 

“Neither the rugged toils of war, nor the gentler conflicts of 
A— B—’s is in my choice.” All things are fair in love and war, 
remember! And, perhaps, this soldier of remarkable destiny, 
under the shadow of possible death, considered it his debt of honor 
to make a -last will and testament of consuming affection to his 
ideal of the perfection of womanhood. “A— B—’s” refer to 
the assembly balls so fashionable and formal at that day. 

Widows were then as dangerous and captivating as now and 
ever shall be. In camp at Fort Cumberland, as Washington writes, 
was Mrs. John Spotswood, daughter-in-law of that brave Alex¬ 
ander Spotswood, who so splendidly led the bibulous horseshoe 
knights on that famous transmontane expedition. She had married 
John Spotswood in 1755, he died in ’57 and this, mind you, was 
in 1758. Why she was in camp we cannot say, perhaps somebody 
else can. Was she a daughter of the regiment? There were no 
“Y’s” nor any trained nurses to excuse her charming tenancy, 
and charming she must have been, for in this rather compromising 
letter, Washington says “If one agreeable lady could almost wish 
herself a fine gentleman for the sake of another, I apprehend that 
many fine gentlemen will wish themselves finer e’er Mrs. Spots- 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


25 


wood is possessed. She has already become a reigning toast in 
this camp, and many there are in it who intend, fortune favoring, 
to make honorable scars speak the fullness of their merit and be 
a messenger of their love to her.” 

Love and the ladies were certainly softening the grim aspects 
of war and making life amorously sweet or amorously bitter for 
George Washington. This letter no doubt, rather surprised Sarah 
Fairfax, who, though secretly enjoying the prudent but perceptible 
dangling of a crimson cluster of forbidden fruit—enjoying it as 
the most careful of women will invariably do—never expected the 
forbidden fruit to fall bruised and bleeding into her hands or 
rather into her heart; for she must have received with a certain 
amount of feeling, no matter how absolutely chaste it was, this 
undiluted message from a strong man’s heart. 

Where is Sarah’ reply? Was it cold and reproachful? Full of 
surprise (?) and horror at the rash declarations of him whom 
she valued highly as a friend and only as a friend? Did its sarcasm 
sting, its holy indignation make the will-of-steel conscious of his 
unpardonable weakness? Did he wish the letter were unwritten? 
Who can tell? But we, ourselves, accord him full forgiveness; 
this letter to Sarah Fairfax reveals the gorgeous passion-flower 
in his crown of red immortelles, the white rose in his laurel wreath. 
We are glad to know that he could love as he loved her, and 
American emotion would have lost a note but for this letter written 
by our first American from Fort Cumberland in September, 1758. 

Sarah must have reproved him, and that severely, as her sense 
of wifely duty and her high ideals would demand. He answers 
her. But there was only one letter of its kind from Fort Cumber¬ 
land; it was the great expression—what use for more? But he 
did ask in this later letter: “Do we still understand the full 
meaning of each other’s letters ?” Does this brief sentence contain 
the least suggestion that her letter held any sweet regrets for the 
barriers that divided them? 

Then he adds: “I think it must appear so, tho’ I feign would 
hope the contrary as I cannot speak plainer without—but I’ll say 
no more and leave you to guess the rest.” 

There are so many things that we feign would know with regard 


26 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


to this crystalline but harmless amour; was George Fairfax ever 
suspicious of the truth? Did he or his formal father Colonel 
William Fairfax ever have occasion gently and courteously to chide 
Sally for her, to us, excusable coquetry? We think not; hers was 
such a queenly, lovely, intelligent, spiritual personality that suspi¬ 
cion was impossible. Husband and father-in-law, no matter whether 
they perceived Washington’s adoration or not, were certain that, 
no matter what happened, Sally—to put it in simple verbiage— 
would not fail to behave herself. 

At this time Washington was rather gloomy over military affairs, 
having just experienced the ghastly disappointment of Fort 
Duquesne. Think of his being overcome with sentiment on such 
a grim occasion! 

War, however, always gives to love: there seems a subtle con¬ 
nection between the visible open-air battlefield and the battle¬ 
ground of human hearts. Feeling of all sorts crystallizes, and 
what would be sentiment in peace becomes passion in war. 

All wars register innumerable love affairs; departure for the 
front means a picture always of tears and tenderness; the saying 
and doing of a great deal quickly and emphatically, for departure 
may mean death. Perhaps, in this year of 1758 Washington saw 
the smoke of Valley Forge and Brandywine, felt the burden of 
his oncoming and herculean experiences, trembled at the possibility 
of never seeing the idol of his life again, and was constrained 
to open his bursting heart to her before it ceased to beat with its 
great secret untold. 

There is a coquettish, challenging smile upon the noble face of 
Sally Fairfax in her portrait at Belvoir in Fauquier today. In 
her hand she holds a rose, saucily, as if she were asking George 
Washington “Would you wear it in your button-hole?” Her face 
is oval, her features beautiful, her eyes a wee bit dangerous, 
eloquent, speaking, her lips apart might be about to say something 
tender or something saucy. Her throat and breast are perfect 
and her right hand on her full, rich frock, fulfills every tradition 
of the old masters for their women of noble birth. 

When was it painted, and are the trees in the background so 
majestic, on the Belvoir lawn? Sally was born in 1730 and died 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


27 


in 1811, living twelve years longer than her famous lover. She 
was two years older than himself. 

In translating the motives and affections of long departed spirits 
one must necessarily read much between the lines: and knowing 
that Washington loved Sally Fairfax we, naturally, try to under¬ 
stand the attitude of the husband, George, too. 

He was, we think, a deliberate, unemotional gentleman. Why? 
Merely because he wrote this epistle to Robert Fairfax, of Leeds 
Castle, between whom and himself only lay the claim to the title 
now held by Lord Fairfax, of Greenway Court. Thus, the letter 
announcing his engagement goes : “Attending here (Williamsburg) 
on the general assembly, I have had several opportunities of visit¬ 
ing Miss Cary, a daughter of Colonel Wilson Cary, and finding 
her amiable person to answer all the favorable reports made, I 
addressed myself, and having obtained the young lady’s and her 
parents, consent we are to be married on the 17th instant. Colonel 
Cary wears the same coat-of-arms as Lord Hunsden.” 

Arms and amiable person forsooth! For marriages of “con- 
venance” and neat calculation commend me to these Colonial Vir¬ 
ginians ; Miss Cary’s beauty and fortune and George William Fair¬ 
fax’s position and expectations, plus the arms of Lord Hunsden, 
equals matrimony! 

Colonel William Fairfax regarded the young hero with a 
paternal affection and after Braddock’s defeat he wrote him the 
heartiest felicitations. He was indeed the hero of that hour, when 
from Indian bows poured a “hail of invisible death, no pellet of 
which went astray.” He then created the immortal legend “Ameri¬ 
cans must be their own defenders.” 

It was then, too, that the ladies of Belvoir sent him the famous 
round-robin: 

Dear Sir: After thanking Heaven for your safe return, I must accuse 
you of great unkindness in refusing us the pleasure of seeing you this night. 
I do assure you nothing. but being satisfied that our company would be 
disagreeable should prevent us from trying, if our Legs would not carry us 
to Mount Virnon this night; but if you do not come to us tomorrow morning 
very early we shall be at Mount Virnon. g Fairfax 

Ann Spearing, 
Eliz'th Dent. 


28 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


This letter was almost too free for any inner self-consciousness 
of Sally; she hardly then suspected that the hero of Braddock’s 
campaign was the least in love with her. With all of her culture 
and social powers Sally did not know how to spell Mount Vernon, 
and she did have legs, destroying the myth of years, that young 
ladies of the day before ours neither had legs, mentioned legs, 
nor showed legs. 

In his last letter to Sally Fairfax, Washington is as formal and 
emotionless as the most conservative and critical would have him 
be. Evidently, the last communication of Sally was not cruel to 
say the least, and he writes: 

Your agreeable Letter contain’d these words, “My sisters and Nancy 
Gist, who neither of them expect to be here, soon after our return from 
town, desire you to accept their best compliments, etc.” 

Is Miss Fairfax to be transformed into that charming domestick, a 
Martin, and Miss Cary to a F-a-r-e? What does Miss Gist turn to—a 
Cocke? That can’t be, we have him here. 

One thing more and I have done. You ask if I am tired of the length 
of your letter. No, Madam, I am not (how candid and emphatic—ele¬ 
mentally sincere), nor ever can be while the lines are an Inch asunder, to 
bring you in haste to the end of your paper. (Did Sally make haste to 
get through for fear she might say something she should not say?) You 
may be tired of mine by this. Adieu, dear Madam, you will possibly hear 
more of me or from me before we shall meet. (Was he beginning to await 
with satisfaction his coming glory?) I must beg the favor of you to make 
my compliments to Col. Cary and the ladies and believe me that I am most 
unalterably your most obedt. and oblg. 

G. Washington. 

Washington descends to a faint humor in this, his last call, to 
Sally Fairfax “Is Miss Fairfax to be transformed into that charm¬ 
ing domestick, a Martin?” We don’t understand the “Martin.” 
Mary Cary, thought to be Washington’s sweetheart until the truth 
of Sally was revealed, married the heir to Jamestown, Edward 
Ambler, and Anne married Robert Carter Nicholas, Elizabeth Cary 
married Bryan Fairfax, and Nancy Gist, sister of Colonel 
Nathaniel Gist, did not marry at all. 

There the curtain falls on George Washington’s passion for 
Mrs. George William Fairfax, of Belvoir, nee Sally Cary, of 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


29 


Ceelys. It is a striking story, more beautiful, perhaps, for its sad 
finality. A little pity makes the whole world kin and heightens the 
artistic value of the picture. 

But, suppose George and Sally had met in their first, fresh 
youth, both free to love as these two would have loved! She his 
inspiration, his patron in the literature of the world and the beauti¬ 
ful niceties of living, she his star to lead him to the skies! Would 
she not have been more his inspiration, his charming guide in 
letters and in art, his bright, particular, uplifting star, if she had 
also been the adored wife of his bosom? Would she, or would 
she not? 

Think of her at Mount Vernon, with her beauty which two 
centuries are not able to obscure! Think of her magnetism, her 
wit, her culture, her unusual mentality, which lifted her above her 
contemporaries, and must have hastened woman’s expanding day. 
She would have been another queen upon America’s social and 
political throne, matching with her charm, Dolly Madison, who 
now holds the center of the White House stage. 

There might have been children if she had been Washington’s 
wife, to gambol and to grow on the green slopes of Washington’s 
childless home. Ah, well, what will be, will be, and what is, 
seems always to make the story. 

Sally Fairfax never became Lady Fairfax, unfortunately. 
George William died before he attained the title. In 1773 they 
went to England where again she could enjoy the privileges of 
the first circles. The Revolution broke out and they did not return 
to Belvoir. He died in 1787. And in 1788 Sally wrote a letter 
to a kinswoman in Virginia. 

Years remorseless tyrants, had written their doleful character¬ 
istics on Sally’s life. She pays high tribute to her deceased husband 
and encloses a clipping from a London paper complimentary of 
his life: 

“Myself nor any of his friends know by whom put in, so that 
it was not a pick-thank.” Shall we call some of the effusive post¬ 
mortem notices inserted in our papers “pick-thanks”? 

However, Sally proceeds to thank God that she has “outlived 
those prejudices of education,” and knows that a “worthy man is 


30 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


to be preferred to the high-born who has not merit to recommend 
him.” “Alas, I must fear the principles of my countrymen are 
not improved by their independence. It has been the maxim of 
my life to go without what I wanted ever so much if I could not 
pay instantly, for I considered that I robbed the seller of the 
interest of his money by withholding the payment.” 

Again she writes that she would include a certain lady in her 
remembrances, “but as you wrote from her house without her 
remembrance, I fear to be intrusive.” Pride and ceremony still 
undiminished! 

And the last thing we can find from her pen is the assertion 
that “the servants and lower classes carry themselves very high 
and are insolent above all description.” The mistress of Belvoir 
could not stand disrespect. “I heartily wish I was with you, 
living at Ashgrove in peace and retirement; but at my time of life 
and in my state of health I dare not think of crossing the Atlantic 
for I have been very poorly for the last twelve months, my old 
complaint, as I advance in life, is worse and worse as may be 
expected.” 

There is exquisite resignation in these words worthy of the 
reputation and spirit of Washington’s Sally Fairfax. She never 
lost her beauty or her spirit or her brilliant mental gifts. And we 
wonder if her color did not rise when, at the age of three score 
and ten, she received, in her home at Bath, a letter from her 
greatest lover. It was dated “Mount Vernon 16 May, 1798,” 
one year before George Washington died. 

He begins the letter with the assertion that five and twenty years 
“have nearly passed away since I have considered myself as the 
permanent resident at this place or have been in a situation to 
indulge myself in a familiar intercourse with my friends by letter 
or otherwise.” He proceeds with a reference to existing events 
and closes the first paragraph of the letter with: “None of which 
events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to 
eradicate from my mind the recollections of those happy moments— 
the happiest in my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.” 

These words are heavily italicized in the original letter which is 
included in the writings of Washington edited by Paul Leicester 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


31 


Ford. He proceeds to write of the dilapidation of Mount Vernon, 
“and it is a matter of sore regret, when I turn my eyes to Belvoir, 
which I often do, and reflect that the former inhabitants of it, with 
whom we lived in such harmony and friendship, no longer reside 
there, and that the ruins can only be viewed as the memento of 
former pleasures. Permit me to say that I have wondered often, 
your nearest relations being in this country, that you should not 
prefer spending the evening of your life among them, rather than 
close the sublunary scene in a foreign country.” 

Sally had method in her preference to remain in England, no 
doubt. Her fortunes had rather fallen than otherwise, and her 
taste was to be out of that romantic life of Virginia which she 
had known and which might not be so much under her influence 
as it once was. Did she prefer to be entirely apart from the 
brilliant and triumphant career of the man who so gladly would 
have shared his honors with her ? 

What of Belvoir, the home of these distinguished Virginia 
Fairfaxes? It is no more; as the place that knew it, is nothing 
but briars and weeds. The ashes of Colonel William Fairfax, 
father-in-law to Sally, lie in what was Sally’s enchanting flower- 
garden. May not her ghost sometimes pluck one of the daffodils 
which still bloom there, and tenderly place it where her devoted 
foster-father lies ? 

No doubt, the house was large and stately, its furnishings the 
best of its short day. Some of it now adorns the new Belvoir 
projected and beautifully maintained by Fairfax Harrison, Esq., 
from whose charming pages I have found much of interest in 
this sketch. At the new Belvoir in Fauquier county is another 
Sally Cary, who sometimes fastens on her slim little self a 
brocaded gown of the Sally of Washington’s heart, and assumes 
the ceremonial dignity of her who lies in the little English church¬ 
yard of “Writhington in Somerset.” 

These Fairfaxes of Belvoir were of sporting blood: “Dear Sir,” 
writes one of the house to somebody else in Fairfax county, “His 
Lordship proposes drawing Mudd-Hole tomorrow; first, killing a 
Fox; then to turn down a Bagged Fox before your door for the 
diversion of ye ladies; but I would not have you think that we shall 


32 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


stop a long time at yr. door, for if y’r dinner should be ready 
by two then we shall pass through y’r door and enter y’r house. 
If you should chuse Friday for our coming lett me know. We 
took the Fox yesterday without Hurt.” 

Sally’s rooms at “Belvoir” were very beautiful; on the floor of 
one was a large Persian carpet and in her husband’s dressing room 
were “an oval glass in a burnished gold frame, a mahogany shaving 
table, a mahogany desk, four chairs and covers, a mahogany settee, 
bedstead with Saxon green covers, a mahogany pembroke table, 
firedogs, shovel, tongs and fender.” Surely a pretty and complete 
interior, for a man, and if George’s dressing room was so elabo¬ 
rately and tastefully furnished, Sally’s especial apartments were 
much more so. In the Belvoir garden was a sundial patterned after 
the sundial at Leeds Castle in England, where its twin dial coin- 
cidently registered the time of day. Leeds Castle, England, had 
become the property of a Virginia Fairfax from his maternal 
grandfather, Lord Culpeper. 

Of course, we know that Sally Cary Fairfax wore, at Belvoir, 
all the most elegant fabrics, and affected the latest fashions of the 
foreign cities and of Phiadelphia and New York. She certainly 
wore brocade, for the frock is now at Belvoir in Fauquier county, 
Virginia. We fancy she talked to Washington in embroidered 
muslins adorned with lutestring ribbons, and that seed pearls made 
her slender throat fairer, and diamonds, set deep in silver, adorned 
her slender hands. We suppose this, but we know what she wore 
at Bath in England, in her last years, for Hannah Ambler made 
her things and we have the bill and the receipt. 

She wore blue and white silk night-gowns, lined; negligees of 
black silk, and walking-green lutestring; frocks of rich black silk, 
and crepe; and for making and furnishing many things Hannah 
only charged her exactly ten pounds. 

Sic transit, Sally at Ceelys, the belle and beauty of the storied 
Peninsula basking in the position and plenty of her father Wilson 
Miles Cary, fourth in descent from Miles, Burgess in 1646; daugh¬ 
ter of Sarah, daughter of the Honorable John Blair, and married 
to Wilson Miles Cary at the Palace in Williamsburg. 

Sally, of “Cary House” in Williamsburg, with suitors from all 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


33 


parts of the colony; Sally of Belvoir, gracious mistress and 
fascinating chatelaine of a proud estate, faithful wife and innocent 
siren who has the honor of the only real passion of Washington’s 
life! But also Sally, alas, of old age and loneliness, an exile from 
family and friends, living a life of seclusion in the country from 
which her forefathers came, dying with only domestics around 
her. Mr. Fairfax Harrison says: “Aliens with paid pomp and per¬ 
functory grief, bore all that remained of a colonial belle down 
to the quaint little church of Writhington in Somerset, and laid 
them to rest in its chancel by her long dead lord.” 

In this little church there is a tablet on which one may read 
these words: 


To THE MEMORY OF THE HONORABLE 

George William Fairfax 

of Towlston in Yorkshire 

WHO DIED THE 3rd OF APRIL 

1787 

AGED SIXTY-THREE YEARS 

And of Sarah, His wife. 


These last five words seem, indeed, an afterthought. Was all of 
the fair Sarah’s distinction embraced in being his wife? How 
many who read it know what an influence she was in the life of the 
Father of a boundless country, a young, but great and fearless 
nation ? 

It was in September, 1758, that George Washington penned that 
clear, remarkable letter to Sally Fairfax, and in January, 1759, he 
married Martha Custis and made her the mistress of Mount 
Vernon. If we did not know what we do know, this marriage 
might seem conventional, suitable, the sweet answer to the cry of a 
brave soldier’s heart, with nothing especially dramatic before it 
and only serene domestic happiness after it. 

We have gathered all that there is to gather, about the women 
whom gossip or history have made the sweethearts of George 
Washington. 





34 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


The psychology of George Washington’s most interesting affaire 
is not plain. Perhaps courage is the key to his peculiar attitude. 

His letter to Sally Cary was sincere—no reason for anything 
but candor, if he preferred candor. By the writing of it he cleared 
his consciousness of neglected duty—he generously offered an 
indelible tribute to the most wonderful woman who had ever 
crossed his unique pathway. 

He unburdened his heart of a pestering fact: he bravely swept it, 
he carefully garnished it with the truth: and straightway sedately 
entered, not the Biblical devils, but a most worthy widow in lace 
and brocade. 

George Washington had courage to face sentiment as he had 
courage to face his foes, and, in both love and war, his unusual 
tactics made him victorious. 



Old Entrance , Mount Vernon 























. 



Martha Custis 


















I T was in September of 1758 that George Washington, for, 
perhaps, the only time in his life, allowed his pen to get away 
with his prudence. It was in January of 1759 that he married 
Martha, the widow of Daniel Parke Custis. How long he had 
known her we cannot tell; though Virginia society was scattered 
along the river shores of Tidewater and, consequently, remote, it 
managed to attain a periodical and delightful sociability. 

Realizing that Sally Cary was absolutely out of the question, 
George Washington, no doubt infused the element of expediency 
and common sense into his next or, perhaps, co-existent affair. 
The widow Custis was comely, of a most suitable age, extremely 
rich, of distinguished ancestry, claiming descent from William the 
Conqueror and of those distinguished Dandridges of Balders 
Green, Worcester, England. Mrs. Custis was the happy mother 
of four children, two of them lay in Bruton churchyard in Wil¬ 
liamsburg before her second marriage, but two, Martha Parke and 
John Parke, were living at the time. If she had had four children, 
why should she not have more? And George Washington, with 
man’s inherent hope of posterity, doubtless saw sons and daughters 
of this union. 

Her first husband was the fifth of his name in Virginia and 
had inherited a vast estate; he owned a principality on the Eastern 
Shore and also the well-known “Chimneyed” House in Williams¬ 
burg, as well as the famous White House in New Kent. There 
Washington visited her in March, 1758; he was engaged to her 
in April, and his sentiment, chaste and nicely bound in silver-gilt, 
crystallized in a ring, purchased in Philadelphia in May. So far, 
so good, but remember the frank letter of September, 1758, the 
swan-song of his youthful indiscretion. No, not indiscretion, 
simply exuberant, bourgeoning nature and most beautiful! 

He wrote to her, too, from the frontier, hastening westward: 







36 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


“A courier is starting for Williamsburg, and I embrace the oppor¬ 
tunity to send a few words to one whose life is now inseparable 
from mine. Since that happy hour when we made our pledges 
to each other, my thoughts have been continually going to you as 
another self. That an all-powerful Providence may keep us both 
in safety is the prayer of your ever faithful and affectionate 
friend.” Friend? Friend-husband, an excellent combination! 
Friend-lover seems an excellent recipe against any sort of mis¬ 
chief ! We can but wonder if these remarkably prudent people 
ever discussed the Sally Fairfax letter. 

There is not much to testify to the connubial bliss of the Daniel 
Parke Custises, but we have a feeling that they were happy with 
their proud establishments, their children, and their youth. We do 
know that his wedding present to her was a watch. And how she 
must have loved it, she who was only seventeen at the age of 
love and trinkets. The watch came all the way from London 
town, and was thus ordered by the young bridegroom: “I desire 
a handsome watch for my wife, a pattern like the one you bought 
for Mrs. Burwell, with her name around the dial ‘M-a-r-t-h-a 
C-u-s-t-i-s’, just twelve letters to mark the twelve hours.” 

This watch can today be seen by all who wish to do so at 
'‘Washington’s Headquarters at Newburg-on-the-Hudson.” Mrs. 
Stanard, who must have seen it, says that ‘‘it is open-faced, with 
a gold case inlaid with white enamel,” with the letters of the 
famous name over each time-telling numeral. 

Daniel Parke Custis was rich. In a letter to the guardian of 
Eleanor Calvert, who married Mrs. Washington’s son, John Custis, 
Washington remarks that he has principalities of land, fifteen 
hundred of which lay near the metropolis Williamsburg, between 
two and three hundred negroes, and eight or ten thousand pounds 
upon bond. His mother’s dower, we may conclude, was equally 
as valuable. Washington was financially comfortable, so the two 
estates promised future ease and enjoyment. 

There are many descendants of Daniel Parke. It is an euphonious 
cognomen and blends musically with surnames to which it is at¬ 
tached. So much did Mrs. Martha Dandridge Custis value it that 
it formed the middle name of two of her children and of all of her 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


37 


grandchildren. One would have supposed that the grandson, 
named after Washington, would have borne his proud name with¬ 
out adding to it any other, but Washington’s adopted son also 
rejoiced in the name of Parke. 

Daniel Parke Custis received his name from his unfragrantly 
distinguished maternal grandfather, Daniel Parke, whose daughter, 
Lucy, married the “Black Swan” of Virginia, William Byrd; and 
his daughter, Frances, married John Custis—more of her and 
him anon. 

Governor Alexander Spotswood, William Byrd and Mrs. Han¬ 
nah Ludwell, a prominent dame of Williamsburg, stood sponsors, 
and it is said that John Custis was extremely anxious to make a 
match between his son, Daniel Parke, and the beautiful Evelyn 
Byrd, but the Black Swan did not believe in the union of first 
cousins, and he had about as much Parke in his own personal 
experience as he could stand. Also on dit that Daniel Parke 
Custis was never in the least in love with his fascinating first 
cousin. 

Colonel William Dandridge was a scholar and a prosperous 
planter, and when he took his seat in the House of Burgesses at 
Williamsburg he presented his daughter, Martha, to the almost 
regal society of the Capital. She was then scarcely grown, a pretty 
girl, not tall but slim and graceful, fair in coloring with brown hair 
and good features. She was vivacious and sympathetic, “her 
manners were modest and extremely winning.” She had the 
education of her day, little enough we fancy; she could write, even 
if she could not spell. 

To meet her was, for Daniel Parke Custis, to yield immediately 
to her charms; he was then past thirty and she about sixteen. 
She liked him, too, but the father, John, sternly forbade the union, 
he had his eye on what he considered a more suitable match for 
his son. Daniel Parke was too much enamored to yield one inch 
and finally this memorial permission was penned: “I give my free 
consent to the union of my son, Daniel, with Martha Dandridge.” 
Within an hour after Daniel received this message he was sweep¬ 
ing across country to Martha’s home; he then lived at the White 
House on the Pamunkey. 


38 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


There has been a war of words over the place where Daniel and 
Martha plighted their troth as well as over the spot on which the 
widow Custis and George Washington were married. Benson J. 
Lossing, without a reservation, chooses old Saint Peter’s church in 
New Kent county and gives a poetic description of the ceremony 
even to the spot on Martha’s rosy cheeks on which her forgiving 
father-in-law delivers the reconciling kiss. His is a dazzling picture 
of a wedding pageant through towering forests, the wedded pair 
“in a coach drawn by four white horses, flanked by six young black 
outriders dressed in white” with a cavalcale of knee-buckled 
aristocrats following merrily on. 

Instead, Martha and her first love, Daniel, were married accord¬ 
ing to the custom of her day within the sacred privacy of John 
Dandridge’s home. No doubt, there were present many proud men 
and women and, perhaps, her cheeks were touched by the lips of 
her husband’s difficult father; certain it is that she and Daniel 
Parke had seven years of apparent happiness and four children, 
only two of which lived to call George Washington “father.” 
Daniel Parke looks like a mild and reticent gentleman, and we 
are told that the death of his children broke his heart and caused 
his death. He left Martha, at the age of twenty-four, a widow, 

in 1757. 

Major William Chamberlayne was neighbor to the young widow, 
and near his residence was a “public crossing known as Williams’ 
Ferry,” much used by folk going to and fro. It so happened that 
on the occasion of the widow’s visit to her neighbor, Major Cham¬ 
berlayne was attracted by the sight of a tall officer on the other 
side, riding a big bay horse and accompanied by a body servant 
almost as tall and smart as himself. Major Chamberlayne had a 
suspicion who the officer was, and could not let him pass without 
an invitation to his house. George Washington was in haste, he 
had to meet an appointment in Williamsburg. Never mind, the 
mint was fresh and crisp for a julep, the fish were biting finely 
and moreover, there was a charming widow at the house. 

At last Washington yielded, at the same time assuring Major 
Chamberlayne that he could only stay over for dinner, which took 
place about three o’clock at those old Virginia homes. With Wash- 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


39 


ington was the body servant of General Braddock, the famous 
“Bishop/’ and the horse which he rode was the one which carried 
Braddock so proudly at the time of his death. 

Lossing has it that just as soon as Washington entered the 
drawing-room it was love at first sight. Lossing had never heard 
of the spell of Sally Fairfax; however, Washington must have 
possessed a rather commodious heart, or in a way there was cer¬ 
tainly room enough in it for two. A young woman in that historic 
drawing-room of Major William Chamberlayne at the time, wrote 
immediately to a friend and mentioned in her letter that Bishop 
frequently reminded his master that it was high time they were 
going; then she apostrophizes, “Ah, Bishop, there was an urchin 
in the drawing-room more powerful than King George and all 
his governors. Silent as a sphynx he had hidden the important 
dispatches from the soldier’s sight, shut up his ears from the sum¬ 
mons of the tell-tale clock, and was playing such pranks with the 
bravest heart in Christendom that it fluttered with the excess of a 
new-found happiness.” 

Lossing asserts that they (the widow and the colonel) talked all 
night. The next day he and Bishop rode to Williamsburg through 
the Maysweet woods which gave so happily to love and romance. 

This was late spring. In the first month of autumn he bared the 
“bravest heart in Christendom” to Sally Cary, and in December 
wended his majestic way to Williamsburg to take his seat in the 
House of Burgesses. 

On his way thither he stayed a few days at the “White House” 
and then the day was fixed. January 6, 1759, he was married to 
the Widow Custis and David Mossum performed the marriage 
ceremony. On that day Washington was magnificent in blue 
cloth “lined with red silk and gay with silver trimmings.” He 
wore a white satin waistcoat, gold buckles to shoes and knees, 
powdered hair and a sword. 

Nothing ever could have been more elegant than his bride, who 
cast aside all traditions about the severity of a widow’s wedding 
garb and decked herself in brave and becoming finery: a white 
satin-quilted petticoat, with full draperies of heavy corded silk, 
high-heeled slippers, buckled in diamonds; cascades of rich “point” 


40 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


garnished her gown, and pearls glistened in her ears and around 
her throat and wrists. It was a gay company that drank the 
health of the bride and groom. Francis Fauquier, clothed in em¬ 
broidered scarlet cloth, with a bag-wig and a sword; army and 
navy officers in their fine uniforms, and great ladies not a few, 
bristling with pride and brocade, did homage to the richest bride 
in all the Colony and the man of the hour, the clear notes of his 
destiny already clear in their ears. 

Bishop, the body-servant, was also resplendent that long-remem¬ 
bered day; he wore the scarlet of a soldier of the royal army. 
Booted and spurred he made a glowing picture holding his master’s 
favorite horse at the White House door. 

George Washington Parke Custis, namesake and adopted child 
of Washington, told Mr. Lossing much about the ceremony that had 
come to him orally from old negroes. A White House servant of 
the name of Cully gave him such a dramatic recital of the occasion 
that, although it may be an oft-told tale, it is worthy of repetition. 

“And so, Cully,” said Mr. Custis to the negro, “you remember 
when Mr. Washington came a-courtin’ your mistress?” 

“Indeed I do, master,” said Cully. “He was dar on’y fo’ times 
afo’ de weddin’ for yo’ see he was in de war all de time. We 
could’n keep our eyes offen him, he seem so gran’. An’ Bishop 
’pear mos’ as gran’ as he.” 

“And the wedding, Cully?” Mr. Custis asked. 

“Great times, suh, great times? We won’ nebber see de likes 
agin. Mo horses an’ kerridges, fine ladies an gemmen, den when 
missus was married afo’.” 

“How did Colonel Washington look, Cully?” 

“Nebber see de like suh, nebber de likes er him, tho’ I have 
seen many in my day. He was so tall, so straight, so hansom’, 
and rid wid sech an air. Nobody like him. Many er de grandes’ 
gemmen in gole lace was at de weddin’ but nobody look lak de man 
hisself.” 

“And your mistress?” Mr. Custis inquired. 

“Cully raised both his hands and his eyes to the sky, ‘Oh, she 
was so bootiful and so good.’ ” 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


41 


Were Sally Cary and her husband, George William Fairfax, 
at the wedding ? 

Washington at once took everything in hand, children and 
fortune and, of course, his beloved wife. He writes to the London 
agent of Mr. Custis’ estate. “The enclosed is the clergyman’s 
certificate of my marriage with Mrs. Custis, properly, I am told, 
authenticated. You will therefore, for the future, address all 
your letters which relate to the affairs of the late Daniel Parke 
Custis to me, as by marriage I am entitled to a third part of the 
estate, and am invested with the care of the other two-thirds by 
a decree of the General Court, which I obtained in order to 
strengthen the power I before had in consequence of my wife’s 
administration.” 

Nor did the happy couple go to Mount Vernon, but stayed on 
at the White House, going thence to Williamsburg and, no doubt, 
occupying the seven-chimneyed house there, which belonged to 
the wife. 

Washington was “dressy” himself as a bachelor, changing from 
his London tailor, Charles Lawrence, because he did not fit his 
“rather slender than corpulent figure” to suit him. After his 
marriage he ordered Mrs. Washington’s and the children’s clothes, 
very smart ones, too: for his wife, “salmon-colored tabby velvet, 
with satin flowers, fine laces, breast knots and Minnikin hairpins.” 

For little John Parke and Martha Parke he seems to have 
purchased the best raiment as well as prayer-books and spinets; 
nor did he stop at his wife and foster children, but John Parke’s 
servant must be also liveried, and to this order he adds a note: 
“Let the livery be suited to the arms of the Custis family,” not 
one bit of apparent jealousy, but a conscientious effort to give unto 
the Custises whatever was their due. 

So far as noted, the life of the Washingtons seems to have been 
absolutely harmonious. We find none of the tragic friction of 
high-strung, although distinctly loyal, passion. She kept his house 
as no one else might have done. She did him credit in public 
life; her raiment and her conduct were ever up to the standard 
that her husband’s high position demanded. Indeed, on such a 
level of virtue and courtesy did Martha Washington live that there 




42 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


is no clear-cut shadow to throw blissful moments in high relief; 
it is all a flood of sunshine that seems monotonous. There were 
shadows on her noble heart, of course, domestic shadows, but no 
lovers’ quarrels, no recorded moments of conjugal misunderstand¬ 
ing, followed by distractingly delicious moments of conjugal 
making-up. 

Dolly Madison pouted at times and we believe Sally Fairfax 
did, too; such fascinating personalities could never have preserved 
the daily equilibrium which sometimes becomes dull in spite of its 
exceeding virtue; in the case of both of them there must have 
been moments of distracting ebullitions, coincident with their tem¬ 
peramental, and, therefore, fascinating personalities. 

Mrs. Washington was correct, maternal, what “Mr. Washing¬ 
ton” said went without gainsaying. She glided with dignity 
through Mount Vernon, and through life, in fine raiment, with 
distant but cordial courtesy; courageously following her lord and 
master from camp to camp and nobody has ever said that she ever 
fretted over hardship. She was as fond of her children and 
grandchildren as the humblest mother of her land, and, perhaps, 
the only sign of weakness ever detected in her placid nature was 
“the spoiling of her little grandson,” George Washington Parke 
Custis. She was an estimable gentlewoman, but search we never 
so carefully, we fail to find about her that tantalizing coquetry, 
that challenging, even though restrained charm, that make men, 
however unwillingly, tumble headlong at a woman’s feet. We are 
quite sure that no hopeless lover ever wrote her such a letter as 
Washington’s to Sally Fairfax. 

They had a beautiful life in their first years at Mount Vernon. 
Washington was fond of hunting with “Jacky Custis” on “Blue- 
skin,” his full-blooded Arabian, and often “catched a fox,” as we 
read in his diary. There were lots of visitors, whom Mrs. Wash¬ 
ington received and entertained in her London frocks and laces. 
There were frequent dinner parties among the neighbors, and 
Washington kept a large pack of hounds. We wonder if they 
ever leaped hpon the table and by canine magic destroyed all the 
dinner, as we have known packs of hounds to do? And if they 
did, did Martha Washington lose her temper and declare to her 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


43 


huntsman husband, as we have known wives to do, that either she 
herself or the pack of hounds would have to leave the place? 

We are quite sure from the records of Martha, in which we 
have lived for days and days, that if hounds had destroyed many 
dinners they would have failed to disturb her peace, if they were 
her husband’s hounds. She was Pauline and not progressive: 
“Wives, obey your husbands.” 

One day, Washington, with Mrs. Washington, Mr. Custis and 
Miss Custis, dined at Belvoir. They were always friendly. Were 
little harmless, zigzag thrills in their perfect exterior deport¬ 
ment? The Washingtons went to church at old “Pohick,” built 
by George Mason and Washington exactly midway between Gun- 
ston Hall and Mount Vernon, that it might be as easy for one as 
the other to go to church. At Pohick it is not hard to visualize the 
first President and the immortal author of the Bill of Rights 
proudly stepping from their gay chariots. George Washington’s, 
we know, had cherubs painted on the doors. Mrs. Washington 
was always “unaffectedly pious.” 

She followed Washington from camp to camp with as good 
grace as she followed her peaceful housekeeping at home, and we 
are all familiar with the quaint old print in which she, behind her 
husband on a mettled charger, holds to him firmly in furred hood 
and cloak, as he plunges through the snow to Valley Forge. It 
was in her days of following the camp that an apprentice described 
her as a “portly-looking, agreeable woman.” 

In 1773 she lost her only daughter, Martha Parke, and Wash¬ 
ington’s affection for his stepchildren is manifest in the following 
letter: 

It is an easier matter to confess than to disguise the distress of this 
family, especially the unhappy parent and mother of our dear Patsey Custis, 
when I inform you that yesterday removed the sweet innocent girl. She 
entered into a more happy and peaceful abode than any she has met with 
in the affectionate path she hitherto has trod. She rose from dinner about 
4 o’clock, in better health and spirits than she appeared to have been in for 
some time. Soon after which she was seized with one of her usual fits, 
and expired in it in less than two minutes, without uttering a word, a 
groan or a sigh; reducing my poor wife to the very edge of misery.” 


44 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Charles Wilson Peale painted the portrait of this lovely girl, also 
a miniature of John Parke Custis, her brother. He thought the 
former so beautiful that he copied it for himself and on the back of 
the picture wrote, “A Virginia Beauty.” 

John Parke Custis married Eleanor Calvert, of Maryland, when 
he was nineteen and she sixteen; no advice of his stepfather to the 
contrary could delay the union. Washington attended the wedding 
at Mount Airy, the Calvert estate in Maryland, but Mrs. Washing¬ 
ton was too heartbroken over her daughter’s death to go. She 
wrote the bride this touching letter: 

Dear Nelly: God took from Me a Daughter, when June roses were 
blooming. He has now given me another daughter, about her age, when 
Winter winds are blowing, to warm my heart again. I am as Happy as One 
so Afflicted and so Blest can be. Pray receive my benediction and a Wish 
that You may long live the Loving Wife of my happy son, and a Loving 

daughter of Your Affectionate Mother, 

M. Washington. 

John Parke Custis died early and left four children. Two of 
them Eleanor Parke and George Washington Parke, were adopted 
by General Washington and their romp and laughter mingles today 
with the stateliness of Mount Vernon, which would have been so 
pitifully childless but for them. George Washington Parke was 
the father of Mrs. Robert E. Lee and dispensed a wonderful 
hospitality at Arlington. Many Washington relics went by in¬ 
heritance to Mrs. Lee. When Nelly Custis married Washington’s 
nephew, Lawrence Lewis, Washington wrote the following re¬ 
strained and commendable letter: 

Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is therefore contended 
that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things 
else when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment it is rapid in 
progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or 
much stunted in its growth. 

For example: a woman (the same may be said of the other sex), alj 
beautiful and accomplished, will, while her hand and heart are undisposed 
of, turn the heads and set the circle in which she moves on fire. Let her 
marry and what is the consequence? The madness ceases and all is quiet 
again. Why? Not because there is any diminution in the charm of the 
lady, but because there is an end of hope. Hence it follows that love may, 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


45 


and therefore ought to be, under the guidance of reason, for although we 
cannot avoid first impressions, we may assuredly place them under guard; 
and my motives for treating on this subject are to show you, while you 
remain Eleanor Parke Custis, spinster, and retain the resolution to love 
with moderation, the propriety of adhering to the latter resolution, at least, 
till you have secured your game, or the way by which it may be accomplished. 

When the first is beginning to kindle and your heart growing warm, 
propound these questions to it: Who is the invader ? Have I a competent 
knowledge of him? Is he a man of good character; a man of sense? For, 
be assured, a sensible woman can never be happy with a fool. What has 
been 1 his walk in life? Is he a gambler, a spendthrift, a drunkard? Is his 
fortune sufficient to maintain me in the manner I have been accustomed 
to live, and my sisters do live? and is he one to whom my friends can have 
no reasonable objection? If these interrogatories can be satisfactorily 
answered there will remain but one more to be asked; that, however, is an 
important one: Have I sufficient ground to conclude that his affections are 
engaged by me ? 

Without this the heart of sensibility will struggle against a passion that 
is not reciprocated—delicacy, custom, or call it by what epithet you will, 
having precluded all advances on your part. The decalaration, without the 
most indirect invitation of yours, must proceed from the man, to render it 
permanent and valuable, and nothing short of good sense, and an easy, 
unaffected conduct can draw the line between prudery and coquetry. 

It would be no departure from truth to say that it rarely happens other¬ 
wise than that a thorough-paced coquette dies in celibacy, as a punishment 
for her attempts to mislead others by encouraging looks, words or actions, 
given for no other purpose than to draw men on to make overtures that 
they may be rejected. 

Every blessing, among which a good husband when you want one, is 
bestowed on you by Yours Affectionately, 

G. Washington. 

Is this the hand that penned the memorial letter of 1758 to Sally 
Fairfax, another man’s wife? Matrimony had cooled and steadied 
his big heart; Martha, his wife, had proved so comfortable and 
consoling that she had forced him to conclude that expediency, not 
impulse, even though that impulse be almost divine, was the best 
formula for matrimony. 

To us this letter seems to draw the red blood from love; it is 
splendid advice, nobody can deny it, but like self-rising flour, 
or machine-embroidery, all the sweet and gradual effervescence and 
the delicious dawdling and anticipation are gone. 


46 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


But the. Washingtons lived while they were living! Camp, battle, 
defeat, victory, and the highest office in the gift of the nation were 
the experiences of the father of his country. Through light and 
shadow, Martha was always the faithful, sympathetic, devoted 
wife, whom he, sometimes called “Patsey.” 

The doors of Mount Vernon swung wide open for homefolk 
and distinguished stranger. Martha Washington reigned superbly, 
her metier was formal reception and stately ball, a profuse hos¬ 
pitality and a faithful housewifery which made everybody com¬ 
fortable. Never against her has one word been uttered. Her 
life was full of a rare prudence, and her religious nature made 
of the word duty an inelastic command. Perhaps, it was just 
as well that Sally was married and out of the question, for nobody 
could have performed the part of Washington’s wife better than 
Martha did. 

She retired to Mount Vernon after her vivid experiences with 
positive delight. She was no longer young. She loved to sit in 
her spacious chamber with one maid knitting, and another cutting 
out negro garments. She kept a sharp eye on her granddaughter, 
Nelly, who even after her marriage lived with the Washingtons 
at Mount Vernon until her grandmother’s death in 1802. Wood- 
lawn, her stately home afterward, can still be seen on the Mount 
Vernon road. 

•""Washington was superstitious, as we all are more or less, and 
just before his death he had a dream which convinced him that 
his earthly days were numbered. Before this dream he had hoped 
to pass many more happy and serene years at Mount Vernon. 

He repeated his dream to Martha. “A great light shone around 
him and her in the summer house, and amidst the light was the 
figure of an angel. His wife turned pale and began to vanish 
slowly from him and he was left alone.” When repeating this 
dream to his wife he remarked, “Dreams go by contrary, you 
know; I may soon leave you, instead of your leaving me.” 

Not long after, at midnight of December 14, 1799, George 
Washington died. Martha Washington, sitting by his bed, asked 
quietly, “Is he gone?” Tobias Lear, too full of feeling to speak, 
held up his hand in assent. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


47 


“ Tis well/’ she said. “All is over. I shall soon follow him; 
and I have no more trials to pass through.” 

She died in an upper chamber of Mount Vernon in May, 1802, 
never again sleeping in the great chamber which she and Wash¬ 
ington occupied and in which he died. 

George Washington, and Martha, and Sally, and George Fair¬ 
fax, and Daniel Parke Custis, are all now where the secrets of 
hearts are known, and we, thinking of them, very kindly, accept 
the words of the Master: “For in the resurrection they neither 
marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God.” 






Thomas Jefferson: The Lover. 


/ 
























Thomas Jefferson 























Thomas Jefferson: The Lover. 

T HE love affairs of Thomas Jefferson were perfectly nor¬ 
mal : he experienced the usual youthful infatuation before 
the right one came along. The human side of greatness is 
more interesting than its own peculiar magnitude, and the young 
life of him whom nature has selected for a great idea, appeals to 
a larger audience than the psychological evolution of his mind. 

Jefferson was really childish and most adorable in his first love 
affair with Betsey Burwell, of Carter’s Grove, near Williams¬ 
burg. This beautiful home gave to sentiment, and a pretty girl, 
framed by its many attractions, was a dangerous magnet for the 
young gentlemen of the day who gathered at William and Mary 
College. 

Charming allusions of Thomas Jefferson’s “first love’’ are con¬ 
tained in his letters to his friend, John Page. 

Christmas Day, 1762. 

Dear Page: To others the day of greatest mirth and jollity finds me 
overwhelmed with more and greater misfortunes than have fallen to a dis¬ 
ciple of Adam for these one thousand years past, I am sure, and perhaps, 
after excepting Job, since the creation of the world. You must know, dear 
Page, that I am now in the house surrounded with enemies, who take 
counsel together against my soul; and when I lay me down to rest they 
say among themselves, “Come, let us destroy him.” I am sure there is 
such a thing as a devil in the world, he must have been here last night, and 
have had a hand in contriving what happened to me. Do you think the 
accursed rats at his instigation, I suppose, did not eat up my pocket-book 
which was in my pocket within a foot of my head? And not content with 
plenty for the present, they carried away my “Jenny-worked” silk garters 
and half a dozen new minuets I had just got. 

But of this I should not have accused the devil, for rats will be rats, 
and hunger without the addition of his instigation might have induced 


52 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


them to do this. It rained last night: if you do not know, I am sure I do. 
I went to bed, lay my watch in the usual place, and going to take her up 
after I rose this morning, same place afloat in water from leak, and she 
silent as the rats that had eaten my pocket-book. 

Had chance anything to do with the matter? There were one thousand 
other spots it could have leaked, as well as this one perpendicular over my 
watch. My devil came and bored a hole over it on purpose, and made my 
poor watch lose its speech. Soubtle particles of water overcame the cohesion 
of certain particles of paper, of which my dear picture and watch-paper 
were composed, and in attempting to take them out to dry them—Good God! 
My cursed fingers gave them such a rent as I shall never get over. This 
was the last stroke Satan had in reserve for me. He knew, I cared not 
for anything else he could do for me; and was determined to try his last, 
most fatal experiment. I would have cried if it were not beneath the 
dignity of a man, and a man, too, who has read. 

However! whatever misfortune may attend the picture or lover, my 
hearty prayers shall be, that all health and happiness, that which heaven 
can send, may be the portion of the original, and that so much goodness 
may ever meet with what may be most agreeable in this world, and in the 
next. And though the picture may be effaced, there is so lovely an image 
of her imprinted in my mind, that that I shall think of her too often for 
the peace of my mind, and too often, I am sure, to get through to old 
“Coke” this winter for, God knows, I have not seen him since I packed 
my trunk at Williamsburg. I wish he were at the devil. I was never so 
tired of an old, dull scoundrel in my life. 

How does Rebecca Burwell look ? Had I better stay here and do nothing 
or go down and do less ? Stay here while I am here or go down that I may 
have the pleasure of sailing up the river in a full-rigged flat? I have the 
inclination to go, receive my sentence, and be no longer in suspense. 

Did the same person pen these almost historical words, who, 
also, wrote the “Declaration of Independence”? 

Thirteen years after this letter was written a serious gentleman 
was going, in his own carriage, from Monticello to Philadelphia, 
to complete one of the greatest documents conceived by the mind 
of man. Each day he made twenty miles, he crossed eight un¬ 
bridged rivers, and counted hardships as nothing to the material¬ 
ization of his stupendous idea. The same man who exclaimed 
“By the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a 
connection on such terms as the British Parliament proposes,” 
writhed and agonized because a little mouse destroyed Betsey Bur- 
well's picture which he wore in his watch. The letter was written 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


53 


when he was nineteen, the document when he was thirty-two. It 
takes a human boy to become humanity’s man. 

Jefferson did not marry the young lady who cut his “watch- 
paper” which the naughty rat gnawed. His courting of her was 
rather restrained than candid; he evinced a decided diffidence 
which reacted on his success. He made others the medium of his 
curiosity and inclination: “How did Betsey look when you danced 
with her?” “Has Ben Harrison been to see her—what success?” 
“If I can’t get her, I will buy a boat, hoist sail and away—to ? 
France, Spain, Italy—where I shall buy a fiddle, and in two or 
three years be cured of love.” He seems, for a long time, not to 
have bared his heart to “Betsey,” but to beat around the bush, as 
it were, to discover her attitude. 

One night he was in Williamsburg and there was a ball in the 
Apollo room of the Raleigh tavern to which he took Rebecca Bur- 
well nick-named by her great lover—“Betsy,” and “Belinda.” 
He was a tall, rawboned youth, not a bit good-looking, and much 
the worse for wear on account of the coquetry and uncertainty of 
his lady-love. His own pen gives us a vivid description of his 
experience at this memorial ball. 

“Last night,” he writes to John Page, “as merry and agreeable 
as dancing could make me, I never could have thought the succeed¬ 
ing sun would have seen me so wretched as I now am. I was 
prepared to say a great deal. I had dressed up in my own mind, 
such thoughts as occurred to me, in as moving language as I 
knew how, and expected to have performed it in a tolerable excit¬ 
ing manner. But, Good God! When I had the opportunity of 
venting them, a few broken sentences, uttered in great disorder 
and interrupted with pauses of uncommon length, were the visible 
marks of my strange confusion.” 

So great was Jefferson’s mortification over his sentimental 
gaucherie, that he made no further effort, he let it go at that, and 
the next thing we know Betsey Burwell has married Ben Harrison. 

The man, who afterwards wrote the Declaration of Independence, 
lost not only his heart but his head at a crucial moment and so 
great was his mortification at his sentimental failure that he seems 
to have made no further effort, but accepted, with painful resigna- 


54 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


tion, the fact that his Rebecca, his Betsey, his Belinda was destined 
for another. 

Of course “Belinda,” the little carefree coquette, saw nothing 
remarkable in the gawky, “awkwardly-enamoured” youth: how 
could she be expected to realize a philosopher, an onrushing 
prophet in a young gentleman who stammered and blushed over 
a simple declaration, whose courage, like that of Bob Acres, 
oozed from his fingers? He positively trembled before the saucy 
nonchalance of a pretty girl. 

Seven years worked wonders for the visible and invisible 
Thomas Jefferson. Quite unattractive in youth, he was good- 
looking at maturity, and beautiful in age. The diffident student 
at William and Mary became a successful lawyer and the bosom- 
friend of great minds much more experienced than his own. One 
of his intimate friends was John Wayles of “The Forest,” a fine 
estate near Williamsburg. He had several plantations, hundreds 
of slaves, and a lovely widowed daughter at the age of twenty-two. 

Martha Wayles was the widow Martha Skelton. Disconsolate 
and demure she eschewed general society, but now and then sung 
with her father’s young friend, as he played her accompaniments on 
his fiddle. Then she, sometimes, played her own accompaniments on 
her spinet while Jefferson listened and learned to love again. 

She had many suitors for she was young and beautiful; her 
father was rich and generous. Two of her suitors challenged 
Thomas Jefferson to a trial of Mrs. Skelton’s preference. Jefferson 
picked up the glove. 

The three of them would go to “The Forest” on a certain even¬ 
ing, Jefferson would enter the house first, ask for the young widow, 
and if she were in, he would immediately offer to her his hand. 
If he was successful he would play his fiddle, which stayed at 
“The Forest” between his several visits. If he was unsuccessful, 
the two who were waiting at the gate would take their appointed 
turn in asking the beautiful widow for the favor of her hand. 
Jefferson slowly advanced from the gate to the door of “The 
Forest,” Mrs. Skelton was in, and certainly with much more ease 
than he displayed on a similar occasion, he asked for her hand and 
received a favorable reply. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


55 


The two men at the gate were quickly aroused from their sicken¬ 
ing suspense by the sweetest singing to the united harmony of his 
fiddle and her spinet. 

“Our jig is up,” one man remarked and off they wended back 
their disconsolate way to Williamsburg. 

On the first day of January, 1722, Thomas Jefferson and the 
young widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, were married at “The 
Forest.” The festivities lasted for days. Cooks and caterers pre¬ 
pared all the culinary dainties which might tickle the palates of 
the guests; there was everything to drink, music and dancing, too, 
and really never a moment for the bride and groom to be alone 
together. 

Jefferson rarely left anything for his memory, and as in other 
situations of life, he kept an account of every detail of expenditure, 
even at his own wedding. He recorded the tips to the servants, 
the musicians, the parson, as well as the fact that before the even¬ 
ing was over he had borrowed back from the parson. 

He also records that he had loaned the widow Skelton a small 
sum, two days before the wedding. 

Their bridal tour extended one hundred miles from “The 
Forest” to Monticello. It was made in a carriage, the driver 
separated from the lovers only by glass. If they had hot bricks 
they must have got very cold on that long journey, for although 
love must warm the spirit it cannot do the same for hands and 
feet. 

Jefferson must have experienced much joy in spite of winter’s 
chill, for he touched an exquisite exponent of youth, beauty and 
prosperity, all his own, in the narrow space of a carriage. The 
wedding journey of our great statesman was not very comfortable, 
physically, in January. He could not forget it and so often did he 
speak of it to his children that one of his daughters thus describes 
it: “They left ‘The Forest’ after a fall of snow, light, then, 
but increasing in depth as they advanced up the country. They 
were finally obliged to leave the carriage at a friend’s house, and 
mount the horses and proceed horseback. Having stopped at 
‘Blenheim,’ the home of one of the sons of King Carter (where 
only an overseer resided), they left at sunset to pursue their way 


56 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


through a mountain track rather than a road, in which the snow 
was eighteen inches deep, having eight miles to go before reaching 
Monticello. 

“It was far into the night when they had made the ascent of 
the mountain and stood at their own door. The negroes had long 
since given them up and gone to their cabins to sleep. No lights 
saluted the arriving pair, no voices greeted them. Midnight 
wrapped the solitary pavilion with horrid dreariness. Worst of 
all the fires were out and the house was cold, dark and dismal. 

“What a welcome for a bride on a cold night in January! They 
burst into the house and soon flooded it with a warmth and light 
of their own, unquestionable good humor. Who could wish a 
better place for a honeymoon than a snug, brick cottage, lifted 
five hundred feet above the sea, with half a dozen counties in 
sight, and three feet of snow blocking out all intruders? 

“Too happy in each other’s love, however, to be long troubled 
with the dreariness of a cold, dark house; and having found a 
bottle of wine on a shelf behind some books, the young people 
refreshed themselves with its contents, and started the silence of 
the night with song and merry laughter.” 

Were they human or superhuman ? Could anything but the genius 
of loving, the ecstacies of perfect wedlock, have so wonderfully 
defied an unpropitious situation? They have given to this divorc¬ 
ing day of ours an antidote for the evil which is the menace of our 
day—“Flood every uncomfortable moment, every misunderstand¬ 
ing with the warmth of love and the light of unconquerable good 
humor!” 

What of the future life of this bride and groom whom we have 
accompanied from Williamsburg in Tidewater to Monticello near 
Charlottesville in a carriage? Ice and snow but heightened the 
ardor of their affections. For them existence was radiant, both 
had a plenty of money, plenty of servants, plenty of surrounding 
beauty, plenty of love and the promise of a plenty of children. 

In spite of his great mind, his universal vision, his very busy 
outside life, Thomas Jefferson was the best of husbands. Men¬ 
tally he and his wife were congenial, socially friends, and as man 
and wife always lovers. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


57 


When Mrs. Jefferson was sick her husband nursed her, when 
she was well their pastime was congenial, they ever enjoyed their 
babies, their books, nature and their friends together. When the 
Marquis de Chastellux visited Monticello, Mrs. Jefferson was 
expected every moment to “lie in,” and Jefferson could not accom¬ 
pany the famous Frenchman to the Natural Bridge on the day 
of his departure. A few hours after the departure of the Marquis, 
the baby came, and as Mr. Jefferson himself expresses it, “For 
four months the house was in dreadful suspense.” He sat up 
every third night, admistered all of her medicine and her food, 
and was never where he could not hear the sound of her voice if 
she needed him. 

It was during that long illness that she, holding her great 
husband’s hand, made him promise that he would never marry 
again. 

He sat beside her almost to the end, but just before the close of 
Mrs. Jefferson’s earthly life, his grief overpowered him and he 
was led from her room to the library where he lost consciousness, 
and remained insensible for so long a time that it was feared 
his end, too, had come. He did not regain any strength for three 
weeks, but when he at last resumed his place at the head of the 
family, his earthly consolation was attained through his children, 
and finally his mind absolutely rescued him. 

His wonderful domestic joy found its apotheosis in the care of 
his daughters first, and the care for his country which owes him 
.so much. 







I 























' 


















George Mason: The Lover. 








t 












' 























. 



























































































































































. 



















7 























































■* 


. 





" 

















































/ 

' 



























George Mason 


































George Mason : The Lover. 

C URIOUSLY, George Mason of the Bill-of-Rights and the 
Seal of Virginia, has never been an especially favorite 
byword for romance, although he loved wisely and ex¬ 
tremely well. Perhaps, it is the propriety of his affection which 
renders it too smooth for speculation and mystery, vital elements 
in the play that grips the interest of its world. His only love affair 
ran smooth and was preeminently true, contradicting flatly the 
familiar old adage which many of us are keen to quote. 

To the great majority George Mason wrote the Bill-of-Rights 
and then he is casually dismissed; but if one goes far enough one 
finds not only a strong, but an interesting personality. He was 
almost too "‘everything” for real romance, but in spite of his 
fortune, his advantages, his prosperity of every kind, he leaves us 
testimony of his love. 

George Mason was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He 
inherited a principality from his father called Dogue’s Neck, and 
landed estates came to him through his wife. Slaves were a vital 
portion of his inheritance, and plate, furniture, portraiture; indeed 
all that paraphernalia of a well-born son and heir were his as soon 
as he came of age, with education and travel thrown in for good 
measure in his life equipment. 

He seems to have made use of his advantages and his fortune, 
and utilized his superior mentality in many more ways than the 
“Bill-of-Rights” and “Seal of Virginia.” The Rappahannock and 
Potomac neighborhoods, in which he was born, were exclusive 
and luxurious; and they opened their wide doors to the elite of 
Maryland, the’sister State, who, in turn extended its own far- 
famed hospitality to Virginians who deserved it. The Washing¬ 
tons, Fairfaxes and Masons, in Virginia, and the Calverts, Carrolls, 


62 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Thomsons and others in Maryland, though divided by State lines, 
considered themselves quite in the same social community. 

Early in life young Mason lost his heart to the daughter of a 
Maryland planter—William Eilbeck—and thereby hangs a pretty 
tale, which we will presently relate. Search we never so carefully 
we find no evidence that the author of the Bill-of-Rights even so 
much as cast his eye on any other maid. His love was as calm 
as his Potomac in its mildest moods, just as deep, we fancy, and 
upon its revealing bosom were endless consolation and endearment. 

He was a “catch” and so was she; both had youth and looks, 
position and money—too much of the latter for the thrill of the 
mad tourney which wins an intricate and difficult “pass.” The 
Eilbecks were as prominent in Maryland as the Masons in Virginia. 
Colonel William Eilbeck, as his portrait by Heselius testifies, was 
a handsome gentleman in ruffles and a wig; he had large estates 
and his pretty daughter, after a sweet and brief courtship, was 
married in 1750 at “Mattawoman,” his home in Charles county 
Maryland, to George Mason, then about twenty-five. Did a coach- 
and-four take them along the Maryland highway, across Rock 
Creek ferry, in which George Mason had a large interest, to the 
Potomac, or did they fare forth from the beginning in a “barge,” 
and travel on the wide water all the way to Gunston, the home of 
the groom? 

If in May, Gunston was a picture. The lawn was vast and 
closely-pastured, and encircled by double rows of black-heart 
cherry trees. George Mason built the mansion in Dogue’s Neck, 
the landed principality inherited from his father and his grand¬ 
father, and the author of the Bill-of-Rights must have had great 
taste as an architect and a landscape gardener. His wife was just 
sixteen when he made her the mistress of a vast and intricate 
responsibility, but from the first she was also the mistress of the 
moral as well as the material situation. 

Did her little hands assist in the planting of that remarkable 
double row of black-heart cherry trees, beginning two hundred feet 
from the house and extending twelve hundred feet away? Each 
one, “raised from the stone,” and therefore, more uniform in 
their growth, flowering in harmony and as much of a curiosity and 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


63 


a joy as the Japanese cherry trees that so gloriously bloom in a 
Washington park today. The carriage way was in the center of 
this avenue with footpaths on each side, and a favorite trick of 
George Mason was to stand in his door beside a guest who was 
seeing the trees for the first time and ask how many trees he saw. 

“Four” would always be the answer, for these wonderful trees 
at the “end of the four rows next the house,” when in full leaf, 
completely hid the bottom and top of all the others, although there 
were more than fifty in the rows. But when the position of the 
guest was shifted he saw with ecstacy four long and close walls of 
symmetrical columns and cones of foliage stretching to enchanting 
distances. 

Scarcely less beautiful than the cherry trees were the walnut 
trees that screened the stables, or the other cherry and mulberry 
trees that hid the servants’ quarters, poultry yards and other 
domestic but frequently inartistic necessities. The lawn was im¬ 
mense ; in the midst of it rose the noble house, and spreading lushly 
below was a large meadow in which the cattle grazed. Through 
the meadow wound the river road, at the end was the “landing,” 
at which all sorts of boats were moored; boats for business, boats 
for the transportation of big things, pretty pleasure boats in which 
the little bride might have sailed, and boats for hunting and fishing. 

Orchards in luxurious promise stood in colonies to the north, 
and the great stallion Vulcan, so famous in George Mason’s day, 
grazed in a high-fenced pasture all to himself. On the west side 
of the lawn was the picturesque village of Logtown, where the 
most familiar and beloved slaves dwelt in log cabins beyond a 
shallow, close little wood. 

George Mason built his mansion on a height in the midst of an 
isthmus of five thousand acres, called Dogue’s Neck, after the 
Indian tribe which had formerly lived there; south of it the wide 
Potomac flowed, on the west the Occoquan, to the east, Pohick 
creek; while, northward, where the great isthmus narrowed, was 
a high fence, a mile long, built to keep the Gunston deer. South 
of the mansion the land spread out on a level about twenty feet 
above the river. Much of it was primeval forest and pasture, 
but plowed field, golden grain, tasselling corn, sparkling or storm- 


64 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


lashed water and dense woods, in the fascinating shyness of early 
green, the brilliant paeans of autumn color, or the bare splendor 
of winter nakedness—always made a picture from the windows and 
porch. 

Gunston Hall, with its five thousand acres, was a self-sustaining 
kingdom, manned and moved by an army of slaves; the number of 
souls on the plantation was five hundred. Slaves built the houses, 
made the furniture and kept them in repair; slaves made the hogs¬ 
heads in which tobacco was shipped, and the casks to hold the cider 
and brandy; slaves made the shoes; slaves spun and wove; slaves 
shod the horses; slaves slaughtered the hogs and beeves and tanned 
leather for shoes; slaves drove mettled horses along the shady 
roads. 

Until the Revolutionary War George Mason kept no overseer, 
but carried on the smallest detail of his principality himself, while 
his wife as assiduously looked after the household afifairs. At 
times 25,000 bushels of wheat were shipped from that historic 
“landing,” sometimes five large cargoes of tobacco, packed in old- 
fashioned hogsheads, went in vessels to a London merchant, and 
while the “lord-of-the-manor” superintended these vast enterprises, 
the little “lady-of-the-manor” was feeding and clothing, and trying 
to save, in her gentle, Christian way, the souls of five hundred 
slaves. 

With all of these imperative duties the master of Gunston found 
time for sport on his natural and extensive “preserves,” where all 
sorts of game and deer were plentiful; this Dogue’s Neck of the 
Masons was once the hunting ground of the red man. 

Gunston, with its cellars for Madeira and brandy from George 
Mason’s old “still,” its high roof pierced with dormers, and its 
stone-capped chimneys, was a kingdom. “In the old square porch, 
with its flight of freestone steps” or, “loitering at noon-tide in the 
pentagonal porch,” we fain would have lingered, in that long ago, 
where the fragrance of the garden, and the river slipping softly 
seaward, wove a spell of romance. It had its little schoolhouse 
nearby and a graystone curb around the well; high and spacious 
hall and rooms; cornices, carving and high paneling of amazing 
dignity. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


65 


George Mason’s romance was absolutely smooth. He, of 
twenty odd, loved a Maryland maiden of sixteen. He was rich and 
she was rich; he was handsome and she very pretty; he was well¬ 
born and so was she. We hear nothing of concealments preying 
upon her damask cheeks; we hear of no other siren disturbing his 
big heart. Theirs was a brilliant match of real love which cul¬ 
minated in years of congenial and energetic joy. They had a heap to 
do and they did it well; they had a heap of children—nine at least. 

They were neighbors to Mount Vernon, Belvoir and other great 
estates. Washington and Mason built old Pohick church together, 
and talked at its sacred door every Sunday. They went also, 
together, to “balls, races, election, court sessions and vestry meet¬ 
ings.” They passed days in the woods together hunting, surveying 
lands, and “held weighty councils on the questions of the times.” 

There was a neighborhood dancing class and Mr. Christian was 
the teacher. At times it met at Gunston and then at Mount 
Vernon. On the twenty-eighth of April, 1770, Patsey Custis and 
Milly Posey went to Gunston to the dancing school—and another 
day in the following July Mr. Christian and all of his scholars 
came to Mount Vernon. 

Sometimes, George Washington and John Custis would start 
for Colonel Mason’s before sunrise and after partaking of one 
of Mrs. Mason’s famous breakfasts, would go hunting in “Mason’s 
Neck,” returning with at least two deer. James Madison called 
George Mason the “ablest debater” and Thomas Jefferson said he 
was “the wisest man of his generation,” but, to his other virtues 
may be added the fascinating and picturesque adventures of the 
huntsman and the fisherman—and his luck was not proverbial. 

Is that all that can be said of the winsome Anne, who at sixteen 
married the great statesman and afterward bore him many children 
and kept his great house as it should be kept ? What the color of 
her eyes, her hair, the texture of the skin, the inches of her height? 
She was born in Maryland, she was married in 1750, and she died 
at Gunston in 1773—is that all? Not all, for just after she died 
her famous husband penned the followin obituary: “Her life was 
blameless and exemplary, she spent her last moments in prayer. 
In the beauty of her person and the sweetness of her disposition 


66 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


she was equalled by few and excelled by none of her sex. She 
was something taller than the middle size and elegantly shaped. 
Her eyes were black, tender, lively; her features regular and 
delicate, her complexion remarkably fair and fresh, lilies and roses 
without a metaphor, were blended there; and a certain inexpres¬ 
sible air of cheerfulness and health, innocence and sensibility, dif¬ 
fused over her countenance, and formed a face the very reverse 
of what is generally called masculine. 

“She was blessed with a clear and sound judgment, gentle and 
benevolent heart and cheerful temper to a very unusual degree; 
affable to all but intimate to few. Her modest virtues shunned 
the public eye; she was superior to the turbulent passions of pride 
and envy; a stranger to altercation; content with blessings of a 
private station she placed all her happiness here, where only it 
is to be found, in her own family. Though she despised dress, 
she was always neat, cheerful, but not gay, serious but not melan¬ 
choly ; she never met me without a smile. 

“Though an only child, she was a remarkably dutiful one. An 
easy and agreeable companion, a steadfast friend, a humane mis¬ 
tress, a prudent and tender mother, a faithful, affectionate and 
most obliging wife. Charitable to the poor, pious to her Maker, 
her virtue and religion were unmixed with hypocrisy and osten¬ 
tation. Formed for domestic happiness, without one jarring atom 
in her frame, her irreparable loss I do and ever will deplore; and, 
although time, I hope, will soften my sad impressions, and restore 
me greater serenity of mind than I have lately enjoyed, I shall 
ever retain the most tender and melancholy remembrance of one 
so justly dear 

Sweet were the halcyon hours when o’er my head 
Peace spread her opiate pinions through the night: 

Love scattered roses gently ’round my bed, 

And morning waked me to increased delight. 

What a tribute! Did not love, for once, run smooth? Would 
we have been more interested, more absorbed, if it had not done 
so? For real happiness and lordly independence, commend me to 
Gunston and the Masons from 1750 to 1773; Beauty, plenty, 
authority, fun, space and nine children! 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


67 


Anne Mason died March ninth and on the twentieth her husband 
made his will. In it he mentions a little silver bowl in which all 
of his children had been christened. One of these children has 
said that he remembered so well a large closet in his mother’s 
room where she kept her frocks, and a little green whip with which 
she gently chastised her little brood. 

April 27 of the year Anne Mason died, Madame Washington 
drove over, accompanied by Mrs. Calvert of Maryland, and Mrs. 
William H. Washington. We can believe that she was very tender 
and sympathetic to the Mason children. They took dinner and 
returned in the afternoon, although the two great estates were six¬ 
teen miles away. Pohick church was built midway that these gentle¬ 
men, Mason and Washington, might have the same distance to go. 

A keen desire to see Gunston Hall became almost imperative, 
but how could it be done? Motors and miles mean money in the 
city of Washington. Fate was favorable in the shape of a 
Cadillac and a naval officer, things which I had hitherto considered 
incompatible. The officer wished to see a Virginia estate, he 
wanted a guide; I was a-hungering for Gunston, so we made a 
delectable arrangement. 

To Mount Vernon all went well. Then things were mixed by 
reason of the contradictory information of a negro and a soldier. 
The negro said, “Pohick and a turn to the left,” the soldier said, 
miles before, Pohick and a vague indeterminate “turn” which the 
officer pretended to understand when he didn’t. 

We rolled on and on, and when we did turn my spirits rose, 
for brazen signs proclaimed “Gunston,” “Gunston,” “Gunston.” 

“You see how important it is?” I beamed with satisfaction 
over my adventure. 

We wound around, around and around. “Quite a circuitous 
route,” the officer remarked. But the Gunston signs gave way 
suddenly to Mount Vernon signs, which was puzzling; and after 
winding and turning and wondering we found that we were thread¬ 
ing the mazes of Camp Humphries—a stupid but an incon¬ 
trovertible fact. The sun was racing down as it will always do 
when folk are making for an interesting point—and have lost 
the way. 


68 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Nothing to do but to get to Pohick by hook or by crook. We 
did it after a while, and found that the negro was absolutely right; 
it was verily turn to the left and to Gunston! The road led through 
romantic woods and we saw the gentle Anne with a coachful of 
children bowling to church on just such a Sunday as this. The 
roads must have been better, George Mason would never have 
stood for such as these. 

As we approached the historic mansion, my heart swelled with 
the things for which it stood—“Right, Right, the Bill-of-Rights!” 
There were the fields, shorn of their romance; wheat, but no 
cradlers crooning crude but soothing melody; forest gone; few 
cattle in the lowgrounds where George Mason’s thousands 
munched the sweet meadow grass; not one negro, apparently, left 
of the five hundred strong! 

Never mind; I knew the owner and she would let me enter and 
enjoy those sacred rooms which Anne trod with her key basket on 
her arm. The motor stopped; a tall, dark, sullen-looking man 
emerged from the boxwood, a fair girl was with him and a little 
boy. 

His greeting and confidences came too close together; the people 
were away, the house was closed; he was a German, he was proud 
of it; he was a count fallen from high estate to be a gardener for 
a rich American, he had nothing, nothing— 

“But me, daddy,” the little boy piped and the German smiled. 
His ice was suddenly broken. 

But for me the house was so much smaller than I had expected 
and so much lower, the lawn had lost its colonial spaciousness. 
The box was fine, but not so fine as I expected—was it on account 
of this German gardener, or the closed door ? 

One is impressed by the noble solidity and symmetry of Gun¬ 
ston ; today it is a mansion of enduring and eloquent impressibility. 
Imagination must sketch the budding cherry trees, the mul¬ 
berries and black walnuts, four strong and twelve long from the 
house; the flowering orchards and the cattle munching the meadow 
grass while Vulcan, the stallion, neighed from his high wooden 
fence. The garden still blooms in spring’s luxuriance. One sits in 
the pentagonal porch, and watches the river slipping, slipping by, 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


69 


but instead of yonder launch and yacht imagination, again beholds 
large vessels bearing wheat and tobacco from the shore to London 
merchants, and in the months to come the gentle and lovely Anne 
trying on brocade and velvet before her big cheval glass in her 
big chamber which wheat and tobacco bought. 

But the log village has gone and all of those who once were 
happy there; the little old schoolhouse is there and the greystone 
well curb, and one may drink of the cooling waters gladly. But 
more than ever at Gunston is the verdict plain that Virginia aristo¬ 
cracy and its profuse and imperial living are gone forever. Not 
many negroes on the Gunston estate, no lines of farm hands 
hearkening merrily to the summons of the farm bell, no distant 
hum of negro melody, no family of nine any longer, with a gentle 
mother with a keybasket on her arm. 

In parting with the reality of a pleasant fancy, we stand by the 
tall boxwood and conclude that Gunston is an epic which, so long 
as it stands, will, in no uncertain way, emphasize the pomp and 
power of a Virginia planter and the sweet and idyllic romance of 
his splendid life. 






John Marshall: The Lover. 






















. 










' 







l 


























































' 






























John Marshall: The Lover. 

T HAT the hearts of great men are very tender is verified in 
the case of Chief Justice John Marshall. Throughout his 
wonderful career, the part of him that all may understand 
is his big heart. It went out to little children, women, servants— 
and makes a literature all by itself. 

John Marshall not only had the genius of a jurist but the genius 
of a lover. It was late Winter of 1779-80, when he met Mary 
Ambler, of Yorktown. His father, Thomas Marshall, then com¬ 
manded the troops at Yorktown and his son John paid him a 
visit. He had been somewhat of a soldier ever since a distant day 
when his father, Thomas, had taken his rifle from a deer-horn 
bracket, and his hunting knife from its hook, in their mountain 
home, and given to his son John his ideas of honorable warfare. 

At nineteen, John Marshall joined the army. He was six feet 
tall, dark, ruddy and ready. He wore a black buck’s-tail for a 
cockade, buckskin leggings, and beneath his blue-and-bufif was a 
buckskin hunting shirt. He was good-fellow in camp, throwing 
quoits, racing swift as a deer and jumping higher than anybody 
else. They named him “Silver-Heels” on account of the white 
heels in his socks which his mother knit. 

Wherever he went he was loved for his sweet temper, his sense 
of justice, his laughter and his wit. He was afraid of nothing, 
and his jolly songs resounded over the hills of Valley Forge. He 
went enthusiastically into battle under the coiled rattlesnake flag 
with its motto, “Don’t tread on me!” and in the midst of war he 
fell violently in love—the first and last time. While he was visit¬ 
ing his father at Yorktown he lost his big heart to Jacqueline 
Ambler’s little daughter. 


74 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


War had ruined the whilom prosperous Jacqueline Ambler and 
he had taken a tiny house at Yorktown—for economy as well as 
for his wish to be near his command; and his pretty daughters 
became the belles of the place. 

Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, who had not a speck of 
love for each other, had an interesting connection. Jefferson’s 
mother and Marshall’s grandmother were both Randolphs: Jef¬ 
ferson’s first sweetheart was Rebecca Burwell, who married 
Jacqueline Ambler and was the mother of Mary Ambler. Little 
Mary Ambler had been permitted by Thomas Marshall to read 
letters from his son John, and forthwith she became anxious to 
meet him. When she was introduced to him she was only four¬ 
teen, but at once she, unblushingly, confided to her older sisters 
that “she was going to set her cap for him.” Her older sister 
Eliza “had expected an Adonis and was terribly disappointed 
when she saw the awkward figure, unpolished manners, and total 
negligence of person”—of John Marshall. 

Little Mary ignored the rough exterior and went to the big 
fellow’s mind and heart. She found him adorably sympathetic, 
human, merry, good natured and sociable. There were balls at 
Yorktown to which the older Ambler girls went and a little dinner 
at the Ambler house to which Mary also was allowed to go. 

Marshall, after some weeks, joined his regiment, but it was not 
very long before he was back in Yorktown. Mary’s welcome was 
reassuring, and soon he was madly making love. Like all interest¬ 
ing lovers they had “tiffs and misunderstandings”: he became very 
jealous of Major Dick, but to placate him for her coquetry little 
Mary gave John Marshall a lock of her hair. He was ten years 
her senior. 

The Jacqueline Ambler family soon fell in love with him too, 
he read poetry to them all and they forgave his slovenly garb and 
regarded him as a brother. 

At last they became engaged, but Mary was too young to get 
married; and when the war ended, Marshall began to read law 
in Williamsburg under George Wythe. His note books stress the 
trend of his thoughts, scribbled from one end to the other with 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


75 


“Miss Maria Ambler”—“Miss M. Ambler”—“Miss Polly Am¬ 
bler”—“Miss Molly Ambler.” 

One thinks of Yorktown as the spot of the surrender of Lord 
Cornwallis; the apex of George Washington’s inspired career— 
where a multitude gathered in 1881 to lay the cornerstone of that 
wonderful monument that rises on its stern, red bluff; a colonial 
port to which ships conveyed necessities and luxuries for the 
colonists; but it has a fresher and sweeter significance as the village 
in which John Marshall so obviously made love. We see him 
stooping a bit as he entered the cottage door; trying in vain to 
keep his long legs out of the way as he sat beside the child of 
fourteen, smiling, as we believe John Marshall only could smile— 
at the promise of her frank, young soul. 

Little Mary with her rare perception, forgot the discord of form 
and raiment to revel in the mighty prophecy of mind; the deafen¬ 
ing surge of his heart. Perhaps he was so big, every way, that he 
wanted something little and young, on which to lavish his super¬ 
abundant strength. Instead of a helpmeet he wanted a mate to help. 

As we walk on those white, historic sands of Yorktown, John 
Marshall walks them too. On his arm is a slender girl, her eyes 
uplifted to him lovingly, the wind blows gently from Chesapeake, 
and the billows s-w-i-s-h on the sand, while he tells the old, sweet 
story to her gentle, acquiescent youth. 

He was the great oak to her climbing sweetness. Together they 
visited Yorktown’s scarred houses which alone, now, tell of its 
little day; they sat together on the shore, night creeping on in 
twilight shadows, whispering “ ’till death us do part—’till death us 
do part.” They went to church together, in their betrothal days 
—and John Marshall’s legs stuck out into the aisle. 

In Yorktown many memories warm the air: George Washington 
receiving the stallion Nelson from the master of “Nelson House;” 
LaFayette with his young sympathy; Von Steuben; but above all, 
to the admirers of John Marshall is the sense of the presence of 
Mary Ambler and John Marshall, the man who was going to sit 
on the trial of Aaron Burr. 

It was in a pause in war that he made love as a patriot and a 
soldier should. He was much older at a time when years count, 


76 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


he was a veteran, she a child; she frail as a flower, he strong as 
an oak. She had been reared with superstitious observance of all 
the niceties of life, he loved loose, homely garments and his ways 
were unconventional. The cloth of the dandy would be absurd 
on his gaunt figure, and he wore what he chose. With an uncouth¬ 
ness of form, a roughness of raiment, he was a prince to the child 
of fourteen, whose romantic soul loved his letters before she loved 
himself. 

Wistfully Mary Ambler saw him escort her sisters to balls, and 
to Williamsburg in the coach while she had to stay behind. To 
console her for her youth, her parents gave a little dinner to Cap¬ 
tain Marshall to which she might come. Then he went away to 
war, and she went on with her lessons, her embroidery and her 
dreams. 

When the war ended John Marshall studied law and Jacqueline 
Ambler moved his family to a little house in Hanover County, 
Virginia, whence John Marshall drove from Richmond and they 
were quietly married. 

What of the domestic life of the greatest English-speaking 
judge? 

One asks, we daresay, “the greatest English-speaking judge?” 
Yes. 

It was not long ago that a number of distinguished and wise 
gentlemen sat around a banquet board at the national capital. 
Among the guests was a prominent lawyer from Massachusetts. 
One of the gentlemen gave a toast to John Marshall whom he 
called “the greatest judge who ever spoke the English language.” 
The lawyer from Massachusetts challenged him: “My friend,” he 
asked, “are you not speaking extravagantly?” 

“Name one greater!” the man who gave the toast replied, “one 
greater who spoke the English language ?” 

His Massachusetts friend was silent a moment, then he gen¬ 
erously replied, “I do not believe I can.” 

John Marshall and Mary Ambler were married according to 
Eliza Carrington’s letter in a little, house in Hanover. Many have 
said that the house was in Richmond, and, certainly, in a letter of 
Jacquelin Ambler he deposes that: 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


77 


“Richmond,” where he lives, “is so forlorn that a house could 
scarcely be given away, much less rented.” And we know that 
when he was Treasurer of Virginia he lived in a house on Fifth 
street next to the lot on which stood the old Saint James’ Church. 
One of his daughters writes to a friend that “the situation (of 
Richmond) is lovely and at some future time may be a great 
city, but it will afford at present scarcely one comfort of life.” 

One of the historic pleasantries of our great judge was that the 
Scotch, who made the large part of the little town, must have 
brought their tiny houses over on their backs, and been glad to 
drop them at the foot of the hill. 

Who were present at the ceremony ? Who was his first grooms¬ 
man, as they called him then, and her bridesmaids? In what was 
she married—muslin? What was her second day’s dress? No 
traveling gown, then, and swift departure on the first train out, 
but a leisurely, dancing wedding; a bridal chamber made sweet 
and beautiful by the family, and a second day’s dress in which to 
come down to breakfast. 

Second-day dresses were adorable; rustling, shiny, flowered 
things opening on lace-ruffled white petticoats. They had open 
sleeves and lace under sleeves which went so well with that day of 
pantalettes and poke bonnets. 

Why is there not a recital of Marshall’s wedding as there is of 
the marriage of George Washington? We are quite sure that if 
he put his body servant, Robin Spurlark, into livery, he was also 
careful of making his wedding—the climax of his only romance— 
and all of its accessories, as beautiful and proper as possible. 

From the house of their sacred nuptials, no matter where it 
was, they drove, we are sure, to the house on “Fourth Street, just 
behind the home of Treasurer Ambler’s, on Fifth Street,” in our 
city; which, henceforth, is to hold the tall, lank groom, as its most 
vital citizen. 

They had children, a plenty of them, notwithstanding Mrs. 
Marshall’s terrible health; he went on to fame and prosperity; 
there was no stopping him; she passed most of her time in bed; 
and there was little social life for her. He proved himself on all 
occasions as versatile in home-making as he had been in camp, 


78 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


in courtship and college. There was nothing he could and did not 
do to “ease” things; and one feels that he could hold a baby as 
well as he could write a brief. 

After the marriage ceremony he only had one guinea in his 
pocket, one negro and three horses. They took a little house with 
two rooms above and two rooms below and started life with noth¬ 
ing but love. This was in 1787. Mary was so delicate and such 
a prey to nervous affections that they had to have a housekeeper— 
Betsey Munkins—but this did not weaken the enthusiasm of love. 
The husband made of her health an altar; he neglected nothing 
that could give her ease, from spreading straw on the steps to 
deaden noise, to reading the books and poetry that she best loved. 
He took off his own shoes as soon as he entered the house, would 
not allow her the least domestic inconvenience, and when the ser¬ 
vants did not clean up to suit her he removed his coat, rolled up 
his shirtsleeves, twisted a red bandanna around his head, and led 
his servants as he had led real soldiers into battle. 

When ill in Philadelphia soon after his marriage, his discomfort 
was not for the pain he suffered, but from the uncertainty whether 
or not he would get “just a line” from his Polly that day. 

After the little two-room, two-story house they lived in a small 
cottage embowered in trees at Ninth and Marshall, and when the 
time came that he could afford it, together they watched the man¬ 
sion, now called the “Marshall House,” go up. On the second 
floor is a large bedroom where the invalid wife passed most of 
her time, and where the busy man went ever up, with loving 
ministrations and words of cheer. 

Eliza Ambler, later Mrs. Carrington, again writes: “His ex¬ 
emplary tenderness to our unfortunate sister is without parallel. 
With a delicacy of frame and feeling that baffles all description, 
she became, early after her marriage, a prey to extreme nervous 
affection, which more or less has embittered her comfort through 
life. But this has seemed only to increase his care and tenderness, 
and he is, as you know, as entirely devoted as at the moment of 
their first being married. Always and under every circumstance 
an enthusiast in love, I have, very lately, heard him declare that 
he looked with astonishment at the present race of lovers so totally 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


79 


unlike what he had been himself. His never-failing cheerfulness 
and good humor are a perpetual source of delight to all connected 
with him, and, I have not a doubt, has been the means of prolonging 
the life he is so tenderly devoted to.” This letter was written in 
1810. 

As we read the accounts of the suffering of Mrs. John Marshall 
the thought comes to us how few women in our day would have 
been permitted to pass a life of mental and physical agony. No 
doubt, a simple surgical operation would have made the poor 
woman normal. She needed a “specialist.” The simplicity and 
strength of the house in Richmond, which John Marshall builded 
with so much joy, are keys to his character; staunch, strong, airy, 
convenient in its day, sincere and simple—it testifies to the truth 
and frankness of the great jurist; and nothing speaks with greater 
emphasis of the fine work of the Association for the Preservation 
of Virginia Antiquities than its possession and care of such an 
eloquent reminder of one of our greatest Virginians. 

Years ago I went around among the oldest inhabitants and 
collected personal stories of John Marshall. The late Dr. Crouch 
remembered him very well and contributed to my harvest of simple 
tales. When the judge moved into the big house the children of 
the neighborhood were somewhat shy of its owner, but after a 
friendly pat on their tousled heads and this assurance: “Remember, 
you are my little grandchildren, boys, and I am grandpa—remem¬ 
ber that!” he was their chum. Some pennies scattered among the 
crowd sealed the bond of friendship forever and aye. One of 
the little negro boys never could find a penny, the white boys 
were too quick for him, and one day, seeing the judge going by, 
he stepped up and casually remarked, “Gran’pa, I ain’t got no 
pennies,” and the kind judge, not a bit offended, handed him one. 

Jim Actor was the butler, and many a subterfuge did he create, 
at the instigation of his master, to protect the invalid upstairs. 
A little neighbor boy was fond of making whips, and smacking 
them; the poor, nervous invalid would flinch and start as if struck 
by the lash. So the judge decided he would buy all the whips, 
and Jim Actor was his agent for the purchase of them, as soon as 
they began to “smack,” at twenty-five cents apiece. 


80 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


“Jim” was a long-remembered character, but he did not quite 
equal in artistic effect Robin Spurlark, the chief’s body servant, 
who wore livery and long, fine stockings and traveled everywhere 
with his master. Once he was actually threatened by a mob in 
Philadelphia, a black and liveried body servant being a menace in 
those parts. When Judge Marshall died he mentioned Spurlark 
in his will; he was to have a room in the office when he got old and 
feeble. A negro woman was deputied to wait upon him, whom he 
constantly consoled with, “Wait on me good, an’ when I die I am 
gwine ter leave you the thing I sot mos’ sto’ to in the world.” 
When the legacy was found to be the ancient livery and the long 
black stockings the disgust of the nurse may be imagined; and yet 
how we of the Marshall house committee would love to have that 
livery now as a relic of an extinct civilization. 

In Marshall’s nature was a perpetual spring of gladness, which 
even the constant illness of his wife could not dispel. He loved 
to meet with the famous Barbecue Club, and to play quoits and he 
generally beat; although at times he failed to “ring the Meg.” 

Though no cheery wife met him at the door, he was always glad 
to get home from his long and tedious trips in his gig; he loved 
his books, scattered all over his house; he loved to wander around 
' his garden and pluck flowers for his wife; and he loved to gather 
the fruit off his trees and send baskets of it around to his neigh¬ 
bors. Also, the neighbors watched him lovingly as he bore his 
pale, sweet-looking wife in her “calash bonnet,” in his arms to 
her carriage for her daily drive. 

One of the most beautiful incidents of John Marshall’s day was 
the patience and family-care of its invalids. They were nobody’s 
business but the precious charges of their own households. Family 
and friends did the night watching, the long day’s wearying ser¬ 
vice, family and friends dressed them for their last, long sleep 
and watched the lengthening, gray shadows creep over life’s reced¬ 
ing day. 

Now it is a doctor, and a quick nurse, and an instantaneous 
removal to a hospital, and an immediate operation and restored 
health. 

Nothing could ever fit into the romance and history of the 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


81 


“Marshall house” as did his granddaughters, the Misses Harvie, 
who with such gentle cordiality welcomed their friends for so 
many years. They were of a rare vintage that gets better as it 
grows old; they seemed to bring the perfume of the past into a 
present very different from those days when Chief Justice Mar¬ 
shall built their house. 

In their quiet drawing-room with Inman’s great portrait of the 
chief, their dignified and gentle bearing melted harmoniously into 
the fluted and half-fluted columns of the Georgian period, the 
carved cornices and mantelpiece, and the big grate of damson-blue 
marble in which the cheerful fire, in its season, always blazed. 
The square porches of the Marshall house, with the shadows 
creeping over them at eventide, must always suggest the ripe 
scholar, reading with bared head when the day’s work was done. 

When we walk up the easy stairway to the monthly meeting of 
the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities we 
love to think that he made this gentle curving stair that he might 
take his precious burden more easily up and down. 

Agnes Spurlark Helton, daughter of Robin Spurlark, the old 
chief’s body-servant, died only a few years ago at Weyanoke, 
the home of the Douthats on James river. When she was eighteen 
Judge Marshall sent her as a present to his daughter-in-law, Mrs. 
John Marshall, of Fauquier county; Mrs. John Marshall, in turn, 
presented her to her daughter, Mary Willis Marshall, when she 
married Fielding Lewis Douthat, of Weyanoke. There, the 
“mammy” of Mrs. Douthat, as well as of her children, she passed 
a long and devoted life. 

John Marshall always went to Monumental Church, and his 
grand-daughters scarcely ever missed a Sunday going and sitting 
in his pew. Mrs, Marshall could never go to church, but her 
husband always read the service to her before he went. Can we 
not catch the echo of his deep, melodious voice: “We have done 
those things which we ought not to have done and left undone 
those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health 
in us.” What had he left undone? Most probably the hymns he 
sung to her those Sunday mornings were “Just As I Am” or 
“Rock of Ages.” 


82 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Once, when he was in Philadelphia, there was an epidemic of 
smallpox, and he kept from home as long as possible, lest he 
might bring a scar to Mary’s cheek. He was on one occasion 
very ill, also in Philadelphia, and he writes how he longs to be at 
his Mary’s side, by her own tranquil fire, but he rejoiced that she 
could not witness his suffering, and he assures her that the atten¬ 
tion he receives minimizes his pain. Always, the optimist and the 
philosopher as well as the ardent lover. What would this gentle 
and suffering Mary have done had she survived him? The tonic 
of his love and cheerfulness was necessary to her life. 

No doubt, he gave the children all their vital discipline, taking 
it as he did everything else, from the fragile shoulders of his 
wife. No doubt, he was the leader in their fun, for his wife’s 
nerves scarcely permitted much noise around her. If she could 
not stand the smacking of a whip outside, she could hardly stand 
the romp and laughter of her own children within; but we lay a 
wager that the old chief saw to it that his own boys and girls 
received as much wholesome recreation as normal children require. 

Next to his wife, George Washington was the idol of John 
Marshall’s life. In 1798, the year before Washington died, he 
summoned Marshall to Mount Vernon. He arrived there late in 
the afternoon, immediately to find out from the general’s own lips 
that he was determined upon Marshall’s going to Congress. Mar¬ 
shall was bitterly opposed to running for the honorable position. 
For hours these two tremendous personalities argued, neither 
yielding one single point to the other. At last, Washington ended 
the controversy by bidding Marshall a sudden and abrupt good¬ 
night. 

At sunrise the next morning Marshall rose, intending to make 
his way to the stables, get his horse and go home, trusting 
time to heal the breach between two tried and trusted friends. He 
did not wish to go to Congress, even if Washington desired him 
to do so. On his way to the stables he met Washington, who, 
suspecting what he would do, had risen, too, to intercept and 
make peace with him. 

Extending his hand Washington asked his young friend’s pardon 
for his hasty and unwarranted expressions the night before; and 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


83 


then, as if Marshall had not already told him, he asked what he 
was really going to do ? “Do ?” asked Marshall gripping the hand 
of his great friend. “Why, sir, I am going to do what you wish 
me to do: I am going to Congress.” 

Yes, whether the gallant soldier at Brandywine, Valley Forge 
or Monmouth; whether the tender lover on the Yorktown sands; 
whether the sympathetic, patient husband in the Marshall house; 
or the grave judge, there was a sweet nobility about John Marshall 
which always cleared the atmosphere in which he breathed. 

Years went on; little Mary Ambler, of Yorktown, now Mary 
Marshall, of Marshall House, after much suffering, passed away 
before her husband and most probably in his strong arms. She 
died Christmas Day and Christmas Eve she tied around his neck 
a locket containing her hair, which he wore till the day of his own 
death, and even then it should never have been removed. A year 
after her death Judge Story found him in tears and he confessed 
that he was weeping for the wife of his bosom, the little girl of 
Yorktown, who seemed always a little girl to him. 

After her death, he always sat in his accustomed chair, from 
which he read to her Sunday mornings; and went through portions 
of the service in memoriam. 

In a paper folded in his will was this most touching eulogy: 
“From the hour of our union to that of our separation I have 
never ceased to thank heaven for this, its best gift. There was 
never a moment that I did not consider her a blessing from which 
the chief happiness of my life was derived. As amiable and 
estimable qualities as ever adorned the female bosom were hers; 
fine understanding, and sweetest temper, hers was the religion 
taught by the Saviour of man. I have lost her and with her 
have lost the solace of my life. 

“Yes, she still remains the solace of my retired hours: still 
occupies my inmost bosom. When alone and unemployed my mind 
still recurs to her more and more. More than a thousand times, 
since the twenty-fifth of December, 1831, have I repeated to myself 
the beautiful lines written by General Burgoyne under a similar 
affliction, substituting ‘Mary’ for ‘Anne’:” 


84 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Encompassed in an angel’s face, 

An angel’s virtues lay! 

Too soon did heaven assert its claim 
And take its own away! 

My Mary’s worth, my Mary’s charms 
Can never more return! 

What now shall fill these widowed arms ? 
Ah, me, my Mary’s urn! 

Ah, me, ah me, my Mary’s urn! 


Marshall House , ‘Richmond. 















James Madison : The Lover. 




m 



Dolly Madison 




































James Madison: The Lover. 

I N the merry month of May, 1768 (according to her tomb¬ 
stone), Dolly Payne, destined, through Quaker simplicity, to 
attain pomp and power, and to become the wife of James 
Madison, was born, not at her home in Hanover County, Vir¬ 
ginia, where she should have been born, but in North Carolina— 
accidentally. Dorothy was the baptismal name of the little daugh¬ 
ter born away from home, to the Quaker John Payne and his wife, 
in honor of her ancestor Dorothea Spotswood, but love changed 
it to “Dolly,” and “Dolly” has tinkled down the ages as the 
synonym of sheer joy and great beauty ever since. 

John Payne could not stand the care-free lives of his Hanover 
neighbors, and he migrated to the American paradise for “Friends” 
—Philadelphia. Little Dolly’s beauty dazzled her environment and 
the Quaker ladies cried—“Hide thy face, Dolly, there are so 
many staring at thee!” 

But Dolly preferred not to hide her face, Quaker though she 
was: she loved to stroll up Chestnut street, her inmost soul assur¬ 
ing her that if she only could wear brocade, hoop-skirt and musk- 
melon bonnet, she would appear quit<Tas encfiantiftg~as any other 
girl. John Payne preached in the Meeting House, and there sat 
“Dolly” longing, perhaps, for a larger life, which she could not 
hope to secure by her marriage with another Quaker—John Todd. 

Their wooing is inarticulate, it has been thought that Dolly was 
not, at first, very enthusiastic, but in 1789, when she was twenty- 
one, she “passed her first meeting,” a trying ceremony when a 
Quaker maiden, considering matrimony, announces her intention; 
another meeting confirms this intention, then the ceremony, some 
weeks later, when the groom repeats the simple formula, “I, John 
Todd, do take thee, Dorothea Payne, to be my wedded wife, and 




88 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


promise, through Divine assistance, to be unto thee a loving hus¬ 
band until separated by death.” The bride utters the self-same 
vow, changing “husband” for “wife,” the certificate of marriage is 
read, and the register signed by a number of witnesses. All who 
sign the register partake of supper at the home of the parents of 
the bride and John and Dorothea begin their wedded life. 

John Todd died after a few years, leaving one child and this 
historic document: “ . . .1 give and devise all my estate, real and 
personal, to the dear wife of my bosom, and first and only woman 
upon whom my all and only affections were placed.” 

Dolly was of a gay and volatile temperament, and finding her¬ 
self a widow at twenty-five, she emerged from conventional gloom 
in a vey few months. She and her son returned to her father’s 
home in Philadelphia where Mrs. Payne, owing to the financial 
reverses of her husband, had assumed the responsibility of a few 
boarders, among whom was the fascinating and very handsome 
Aaron Burr. He made the match between the pretty widow and 
James Madison; and we can feel the enthusiasm and excitement 
of Dolly—herself, as she writes to an intimate friend—“Thou must 
come to me—Aaron Burr says that the great, little Madison has 
asked to be brought to me this evening.” Madison was then 
forty-three and Dolly twenty-six. 

He had been somewhat in love once before with a girl of six¬ 
teen who rejected him. It was on the occasion of the discarding of 
James Madison by Catherine Floyd that Jefferson writes to the 
rejected lover: 

“I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened, from 
whatever cause it may have happened; should it be final, however, 
the world presents the same and many other resources of hap¬ 
piness.” This was Jefferson’s most elegant adaptation of the old 
adage, “Good fish in the sea as ever caught out of it.” 

Ten years had passed, when James Madison called on the pretty 
widow Todd and found her charmingly demure in a frock of mul¬ 
berry satin with a tulle scarf folded over her bosom. One who 
knew Dolly has recorded the wonder “of the pearly whites and 
rose-tints of her complexion.” 

What a picture fancy paints of that memorable meeting in Mrs. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


89 


Payne’s parlor of Quaker severity! Burr full of charm and 
grace; Madison a trifle constrained, unimpassioned, but with a 
glint of humor in his eye. Burr was a Senator, Madison a member 
of the Lower House. 

It would be interesting to know how Dolly regarded them both; 
was she impressed with Burr’s fascinating personality, or did her 
crystal heart reflect the stronger characteristics of James Madison? 
Was she astute and discerning? Within the black clothes and 
ruffled shirt did she perceive the unmistakable tokens of qualities 
which would always sustain and delight her? 

Madison asked for the young widow’s hand; the young widow 
bestowed it, and everybody was pleased from General and Mrs. 
Washington to the young widow’s mother, who was in Philadel¬ 
phia entertaining paying guests—among them Aaron Burr. 

Dolly had been married very quietly to John Todd, now, per¬ 
haps, foreseeing the splendor of her second married life she chose 
to be married at Harewood, in Virginia, the home of her sister, 
Mrs. George Steptoe Washington. From Philadelphia they fared 
forth, the prospective groom, the prospective bride, Dolly’s sister, 
Anna Payne and her little son, Payne Todd, with servants also 
in attendance. It was an unique and sentimental caravan which 
passed through valleys, over mountains, across streams; from 
Pennsylvania into Maryland, from Maryland through Virginia 
into Jefferson County, where stood one of the most beautiful and 
unknown of all the Washington homes—a home which magnifi¬ 
cently gave to all the traditions of an eighteenth century wedding. 
The name of the mansion was Harewood. 

Little is known of their brief courtship, hardly one year had 
elapsed since the bride had lost husband and child, but as before 
related, Dolly was of a volatile temperament and she took no more 
to her heart than she could dispose of with her heels. 

No Quaker parson united James Madison and his wife in the 
holy bonds of wedlock, but they were married according to the 
ritual of the Protestant Episcopal Church; there was a marriage 
feast, and dancing a plenty, until the night was old. 

What did Dolly wear? No record says, Widows must not wear 
white, so the wedding gown was most probably of grey, no veil, 


90 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


no orange blossoms for the radiant woman, who, with all the glory 
of her long life, could never revert to the thrill which such eloquent 
accessories give to a supreme moment. 

Wedding festivities lasted a long time in 1794, and while Hare- 
wood was still resounding with music and laughter Mr. and Mrs. 
James Madison, like Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson, started home in 
their coach. The distance was about the same from Harewood 
to Montpelier as from Williamsburg to Monticello, but no snow¬ 
storm forced the horses to be taken from the Madison coach, in 
order that a bride and bridegroom might reach journey’s ends 
upon their backs. 

What a panorama of loveliness broke upon the enraptured eyes 
of Dolly Madison when she at last reached home, what a way of 
beauty was her’s from Harewood to Montpelier! The silver 
Shenandoah, the storied Valley merging from summer green into 
autumn brown, the guardian mountains all in blue—pictures and 
prophecy! Pictures painted on their new world to foretell ensuing 
success and joy. It was honeymoon road to honeymoon house. 
At Montpelier the honeymoon was full, and it never declined 
through a married life of thirty years. Married life was always 
honeymoon for the Madisons from the moment they started from 
Harewood until just before James Madison died, when Dolly, in 
a letter, calls him “My Beloved,” and ends the letter with, “My 
mind is so anxiously occupied about you, that I cannot write. 
May angels guard thee, my dear, best friend: “D.” 

Yes, Dolly had a good time and always to the tune of pure affec¬ 
tion. James Madison was a lovable man, she liked fun and he 
did not, but he was big enough to be glad for her to enjoy those 
things for which he had no fancy. Thomas Jefferson, President; 
Madison, Secretary of State, and Dolly, first lady of the land. Mr. 
Jefferson’s daughters were married and lived at a distance, and 
they were not always in Washington. Mrs. Madison, most ac¬ 
ceptably to the President, became his delightful assistant on official 
occasions. Dolly Madison, full to the brim and running over 
with courtesy and charm, was equal to any formal social emerg¬ 
ency, nothing daunted her: she was as naive and simple in her 
intercourse with the great of her day as she had been with the 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


91 


quiet Quakers of Philadelphia. She put on no airs, but smiling 
and joking, helping and sympathizing, dancing and dining, she 
insinuated her unusual personality into the heart of a world, which 
continues to hold it. 

She was called “Queen Dolly,” and as we learn of all those 
who have reigned at the White House since, is there one who 
quite stands in her little slippers as the earnest of a magnetic and 
adorable personality? 

She loved parties and she loved shops; she loved dances and 
she loved jokes; she loved people and she loved things; she loved 
her husband and she loved her home, and into the world she 
spilled real sunshine which still sparkles along the ways she went. 

On the fourth of March, 1809, her husband was inaugurated as 
President of these United States. Imagine Dolly’s ecstacy as she 
witnessed the august ceremonial, as she entertained the Presidential 
party with good cheer at her own home, as she danced at the 
ball, “where none were so elegant as the President’s wife in a 
robe of yellow velvet, her bare neck and arms hung with pearls 
and her head nodding beneath a Paris turban with a bird-of- 
paradise plume.” 

The little President was very quiet “in a suit of clothes wholly 
of American manufacture, made of the wool from merino sheep 
bred and reared in this country. His coat was from the manu¬ 
factory of Colonel Humphreys, and his waistcoat and small clothes 
from that of Chancellor Livingston, both being gifts offered in 
token of respect by those gentlemen.” 

Although James Madison took the gay life of his wife philoso¬ 
phically, we do know that he became very tired of the small part 
he played in it, and seriously thought of giving up official life and 
retiring to his beautiful Virginia estate. No doubt Dolly used 
all her subtle wiles to prevent this, aided and abetted by her loyal 
admirer Thomas Jefferson, who, at the time of Madison’s unrest, 
wrote, “Present me respectfully to Mrs. Madison, and pray her 
to keep you where you are, for her own satisfaction and for the 
public good.” 

Through Washington’s administration Dolly won golden opin¬ 
ions from all sorts of people, even John Adams, who had no taste 


92 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


either for Madison or Jefferson, informed his wife “that Mrs. 
Madison is a fine woman.” She had the trick of effacing herself 
and enlarging her friends, who constantly said that Dolly made 
them think better of themselves. What genius! It is not unusual 
for one to feel rather like a publican, a sinner, yea, even a leper, 
when escaping from the pomp of those in Dolly’s exalted position. 

When Washington’s administration ended, the Madisons retired 
to Montpelier once more, honeymoon house! They wrote an 
idyll of marital affection, domestic peace and cheery intercourse 
which will never fade from the atmosphere of their home, so 
precious to themselves. The same captivating temperament which 
always reacted upon an urban formality, vivified the sweet simpli¬ 
cities of rural life. Trees, flowers, sheep and chickens must have 
understood the radiance of her smile, which was the challenge to 
some quality in her sober husband, which always expressed itself 
in a twinkle of his eye. 

In 1809 Dolly Madison was the real first lady of our land, and 
in the White House with her “dear, best friend,” first through 
her mind and then with her merriment she reinforced him magni¬ 
ficently, on all occasions, when either were required. She loved 
this “little Jim Madison with a queue no bigger than a pipe-stem.” 
Madison, himself, was excited on the day of his inauguration and 
his deep feeling “loaned color to his pale, student face, and dignity 
to his small, slender figure.” 

Mrs. Madison’s mind asserted itself during her husband’s ad¬ 
ministration and she met the great minds connected with it ab¬ 
solutely undaunted. Her popularity increased daily and Wash¬ 
ington Irving at that time remarked that she “was a fine, portly, 
buxom dame, who has a smile and pleasant word for everybody.” 
The late James G. Blaine was very certain that she “saved her 
husband’s administration, held him back from the extremes of 
Jeffersonism.” 

They laughed together, and thought together—James Madison 
and his wife—and wept together, too. They tasted sorrow over 
the frailties of Dolly’s only child; equally they shared the blow of 
the death of their respective parents, both went into mourning 
when Washington died and when Jefferson died; and the horrors 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


93 


of the war of 1812 made Dolly almost as serious as her great, 
little James. 

Quickly Dolly responded to the healing touch of time and the 
woman who rushed into the burning White House and rescued 
Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington soon after the war was as 
gay as ever. 

Some one has chronicled “It is not her form, it is not her face, 
it is the woman altogether. . . She wears a crimson cap that 

almost hides her forehead and reminds one of a crown, from 
its brilliant appearance, contrasted with the white satin folds and 
her jet black curls; but her demeanor is so removed from the 
hauteur generally attendant on royalty, that fancy can carry the 
resemblance no further.” 

She always received on New Year’s day and once in a rose- 
colored satin robe trimmed with ermine, with her turban fastened 
by a crescent, whence towered white ostrich plumes, which marked 
her wherever she walked. The President was lost from time to 
time in the throng; but his wife’s plumes towered like the emblem 
of Navarre.” 

Contrasts are congenial as Nature often proves, and the little, 
grave man often lost in the crowd which his office created, in his 
heart of red blood always reveled in the brilliant aspect of his 
wife. He loved the miniature painted of her at this period in a 
white turban revealing coal black curls, ear-rings and necklace. A 
bunch of rosebuds adorns the turban and the low velvet gown is 
saved by a lace scarf. Dolly took snuff and sometimes wore a 
little rouge, and strange as it may seem, James Madison did not 
apparently object. Indeed whatever Dolly did was all right with 
him. 

The ecstacies of public life over, back to Montpelier this brilliant 
woman and her sober husband went, as cheerfully as they left it 
for the seductions and gravities of the White House. 

They rode back over the old post road, still honeymooning, to 
honeymoon house. No mean mansion for a retiring President was 
stately Montpelier. There again they resumed the simple life: 
James the farmer, Dolly the gardener, rising early and throwing 
their big hearts and their good ideas into the improvement of a 



94 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


wonderful estate. No whining for past glory, but days too short 
for the cares of home. They kept open house and its mistress 
was, mentally, as scintillating, physically as beautiful, spiritually 
as lovable as she was in Washington. She sailed through her 
large rooms like a queen, and lived the life of a model woman— 
always the sweetheart of her much older husband. 

She dangled a great bunch of keys, and storeroom and smoke¬ 
house doors were only opened in her presence. For twenty years 
these immortal lovers lived at Montpelier, and the infirmities of 
age never lessened the bond between them. For eight months 
before Madison’s death his precious Dolly never left the place. 
Flat of his back his eyes would twinkle and his humor cheer the 
watcher beside his bed. If she begged him not to talk he would 
assure her “I always talk more easily when I lie.” 

In Dolly’s reply to the condolence of Andrew Jackson she be¬ 
moans the departure “of him who had never lost sight of that 
consistency, symmetry and beauty of character, in all its parts, 
which secured to him the love and admiration of his country.” 

Yet Dolly’s nature still refused to be conquered by bereavement, 
she honored her departed lover by still holding to the world a 
picture of brave cheerfulness. It was her creed. She returned 
to Washington and spent twelve years in the famous Octagon 
House whose proudest boast is the tenancy of it by Dolly Madison. 
It is now the Cosmos Club, but more than, even, that distinction is 
the glory of being Dolly’s last earthly home. Part of her heart 
was in a grave, but some of her heart was in the world. 

Her dress, as a widow, was frequently of purple velvet, full 
skirted, tight-waisted, cut low at the neck and filled in with tulle. 
She wore ear-rings and always a lace cape over her shoulders. 

The beautiful old widow held court in Octagon House, every¬ 
body went there, as everbody had gone to the White House, she 
held levees and gave dinners and received the most distinguished 
people. 

Her last appearance in society was at a levee held during Mr. 
Polk’s administration. Towards the close of the evening, on 
President Polk’s arm, she passed through the crowded rooms. 
“She entered the gay life of our Capitol on the arm of Thomas 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


95 


Jefferson and left it on the arm of James K. Polk. Between 
times a frailer arm held her, but upon it, and within it, she found 
her most real joy. She passed to her reward still a young lady 
of eighty-eight summers.” 

On the White House wall the portrait of Dolly Madison hangs, 
the gift of the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of 
Virginia, in a dull gold frame; her beauty is heightened by the 
simplicity of her raiment. She still smiles as she smiled long ago— 
a being of heart and spirit, she cannot die. Her fascinating qual¬ 
ities will forever fill the places where her earthly life was spent. 

Her happy union, with a grave and thoughtful statesman, is one 
of the most convincing proofs of the possibility of perfect 
sympathy between dissimilar personalities. 

The elements which created the brave spirits of these lovers 
dovetailed and fitted well. 




John Randolph: The Lover. 








John Randolph: The Lover. 

W ANDERING dreamily through the Corcoran Art Gal¬ 
lery a short time ago, I was suddenly transfixed with 
admiration of one of Gilbert Stuart’s masterpieces. A 
young man almost breathed and certainly spoke to me from his 
wide, dark frame. His was an irresistible beauty, a dreamy elo¬ 
quence suggestive of lovers, of poets, of romances with, possibly, a 
low light of sadness to lift the spirit of the sensitive face. 

Fathomless dark eyes melted into living sympathy, a strong, 
but delicate mouth might have, indeed, just whispered a pleasant 
word; a high, well-moulded nose fell easily into the classic oval 
of a prophetic but hopeful countenance. The picture spoke? 
What did it say? “Yes, it is I, John Randolph, the lover; John 
Randolph, who rode through leafy Chesterfield lanes, smiling; 
John Randolph, the lover, who strolled along grass walks in a 
Chesterfield garden; John Randolph, the lover, who whispered 
sweet nothings in a dim Chesterfield parlor to Maria Ward.” 

Virginians should be grateful to Gilbert Stuart for many things, 
for his Dolly Madison, his George Washingtons, his Thomas Jef¬ 
ferson, but for nothing should we be more grateful to Gilbert 
Stuart than for catching so exquisitely the priceless expression of 
John Randolph, the lover. 

Subsequent portraits betray the encroaching bitterness, the 
stern implacability which marred the man; but Gilbert Stuart 
has given us the face of a lover-poet ready to chant a love-song 
for the ages. And John Randolph could sing, for a contemporane¬ 
ous friend has recorded that his voice to him exceeded in sweetness 
any human voice which he had ever heard. What a pity he did 
not sing more when he could sing. 

Did Gilbert Stuart realize that he was giving to posterity a gem, 


100 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


from his master-brush, which was going, forever, to erase, if but 
for a moment, the impression of a genius doomed to bodily suffer¬ 
ing and mental anguish? This despondent genius who announced, 
“I cannot imagine any state of things under which I should not 
be wretched; I am sick of both men and measures, and only wish 
to find some resting place where I may die in peace. All is dark 
and comfortless and hopeless. Language cannot express the thou¬ 
sandth part of the misery I feel.” 

Stuart’s beautiful picture in the Corcoran Art Gallery holds no 
suggestion of the captious genius, the politician with the cutting 
and often merciless thrusts, the suffering misanthrope of Roanoke. 
It is the immortal conception of a lover, a dreamer to whom a 
smiling fate offers wife, children, home, flowers and peace. 

Yes, John Randolph was once a lover, and would his love story 
be so appealing if it had ended well? Nature is love, and idyllic 
love finds its paradise in woods where rhododendrons grow; in 
fields over which the larks skim; in old gardens, where snowballs 
and hollyhocks blow; in dim parlors where roses of a hundred 
leaves shed faint perfume from blue India bowls. In these en¬ 
chanting and inspiring spots, John Randolph and Maria Ward 
held their young trysts. 

He was born at the home of his maternal grandfather, Theo- 
dorick Bland, who lived at “Cawsons,” on the Appomattox, just 
as it flows into the James; his mother was the beautiful Frances 
Bland, whose portrait is owned by a descendant in Richmond; she, 
as her famous son had it, “was the only person who ever under¬ 
stood me.” She married John Randolph, son of Richard Ran¬ 
dolph, of “Curls,” on the James, and John was the youngest of 
her Randolph childen; later, she married St. George Tucker and 
had other children. During all of her married life she lived at 
Matoax, two miles from Petersburg. Both Matoax and Cawsons 
were destroyed by fire. 

That little boy of Cawsons and Matoax was a dreamer, as his 
portrait would suggest. “He sought amusements within,” and 
when the little boys and girls of the neighborhood came to see 
him they always played “ladies and gentlemen” and read Arabian 
Nights. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


101 


He was born in 1773 and in 1781 Virginia was invaded by the 
traitor Arnold. Reports of his atrocities pervaded the whole social 
atmosphere, and on the third of January Mrs. Tucker and her 
young family fled from Matoax to Winterpock, the home of Mr. 
Benjamin Ward, Jr., in Chesterfield, and, presumably, less liable 
to the intrusion of Arnold and his company. 

There John Randolph first met Maria Ward; before the bright 
fire at Winterpock they played that night “blissfully unconscious 
of the deep drama of life, in which they were destined to play 
so sad a part.” That winter evening registered the first note of 
one of the most pathetic of Virginian love stories. 

For the rest we must read between the lines of history. It was 
not very far from Matoax to Winterpock. We fancy that the 
“most beautiful boy one ever beheld” stole the heart of the pretty 
child of Winterpock. We fancy as he grew up, John Randolph 
rode over to renew his acquaintance, that he and she rode together 
along the quiet, shaded roads, and felt long before he spoke. They 
met often at church, perhaps, and at birthday parties of other girls 
and boys. 

Nothing gave so to love as the remoteness and romance of by¬ 
gone country life; the houses were filled with pictures and tradi¬ 
tions of those who had passed. There was Great-Grandmother 
Page in her wedding gown; there was Great-Grandmother Bur- 
well with her twins, and Great-Grandfather Todd, just after his 
famous duel for the hand of the great-grandmother by his side; 
there was the lovers’ walk in the garden and the trees with the 
initials, and the silver bowl from which the babies were baptized: 
and these eloquent witnesses of love capsuled the essence of love 
which Virginia boys and girls soon absorbed. 

They worshipped with each other in the high-backed pews, were 
confirmed together, had their first communion together and wept 
together when a neighbor was removed. It is most probable that 
John Randolph and Maria Ward, in the moments of their fireside 
frolic, when he was only eight years old, received the germ of a 
romance which, maybe, is lovelier because there is so much that 
we must imagine that we do not know. 

Providence is kind to have left us not only the lover-portrait of 


102 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


John Randolph, but also the exquisite miniature of Maria Ward. 
One can but adore her gentle child-face, which must have accepted 
love as the lily takes its dew; her eyes are limpid, innocent and 
wide apart, with straight, dark brows; her nose betokens the high¬ 
bred maiden and her lips make a cupid’s bow. Her head sits as 
daintily on her slender throat as a flower upon its stem, and her 
curling hair frames a winsome, wistful beauty, which seems too 
trustful for our threatening world. Her mother was her lover’s 
mother’s friend, and no doubt the two proud families looked with 
approbation at the prospect of so suitable a union. 

For several years the pretty story ran onward to its close; two 
lovers in a beautiful countryside, basking in each season’s glory, 
awaiting a joyous climax which never came. 

One day he rode over; she was in the garden; instead of caresses 
and the vision of united lives, he rose to supreme renunciation and 
a magnificent self-sacrifice. They talked long and painfully amidst 
the lilacs, and the little trailing things that bordered the “grass- 
walk.” He must not marry her; an insuperable physical defect, of 
comparatively recent date, had created a barrier over which neither 
his conscience nor his passion could leap. His life was dead— 
hers, he prayed, might be renewed and it was. 

Disappointment was the poison that made John Randolph a 
bitter man without a God for many, many years. Two women 
dominated his life. Of his mother he writes: 

“When I could first remember I slept in the same bed with my 
widowed mother; each night before putting me to bed, I repeated 
on my knees before her the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ 
Creed; each morning kneeling in the bed I put up my little hands 
in prayer in the same form. Years have since passed away. I 
have been a sceptic, a professed scoffer, glorying in my infidelity 
and vain of the ingenuity with which I could defend it. Prayer 
never crossed my mind but in scorn. I am now conscious that the 
lessons above mentioned, taught me by my dear and revered 
mother, are of more value to me than all that I have learned from 
my preceptors and compeers. On Sunday I said my catechism, a 
great part of which, at the distance of thirty-five years, I can yet 
repeat.” 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


103 


When he left the Winterpock garden after his last pathetic inter¬ 
view with Maria Ward, he was terribly affected. He went rapidly to 
his horse, which was tied to the limb of a tree on the lawn, and instead 
of untying the bridle reins he slashed them, in two, angrily with his 
knife, and rode madly from the lawn and down the long lane. 

Once again, they tell us, he rode to Winterpock, dismounted, 
tied his horse and walked nervously upon the veranda, then sud¬ 
denly changed his mind and again rode away. How his frantic 
heart must have longed to renew the beautiful, innocent idyl of 
his tragic life. 

Maria Ward’s mother married General Everard Meade after 
the death of Maria’s father, who, not at first understanding the 
reason for the broken engagement, challenged Randolph for a duel, 
but Randolph’s candid explanation prevented it. The breach be¬ 
tween the lovers, as might have been expected, for their mutual 
passion could hold no compromise, was final: for a long time they 
did not speak to each other, and they seldom met. 

What would we not give for the neighborhood gossip of those far¬ 
away days ? The varied interpretation of the tragedy, the way she 
looked the first time she came to church and at her first dancing party; 
afterward, his public moods, his increasing impatience and fractious¬ 
ness ! We do know how valiantly he threw himself into public life 
and the quick bursting upon the world of his remarkable genius. 

What would he not have been but for that ghastly illness which 
so seriously affected his already frail body, that a marriage with 
Maria Ward was impossible? Would John Randolph’s children 
have gamboled under the trees and on the greensward of Roanoke ? 
Would the gentleness of Maria Ward, the wife, have tamed the 
tiger in his soul, and made of him a gentler, nobler genius, seeing 
not only the imperfections of others but his own as well? 

And how could a woman love another who had loved John Ran¬ 
dolph so well? Where was such another nightingale voice, such 
wondrous eyes turning from dark blue to darker hazel then grow¬ 
ing black as midnight and brilliant as the stars? If he swayed 
multitudes by his feeling eloquence, how much more must he have 
touched and turned the heart of Maria Ward with his heart- 
language in the Winterpock garden! 


104 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


“Maria was a lovely and fascinating woman, the greatest belle 
of her day in the State,” we are told. “She married Peyton Ran¬ 
dolph, son of Edmund Randolph, Secretary of State under General 
Washington.” She had children and her name is now borne and 
revered by her descendants in Richmond. 

Tradition says that LaFayette was fascinated by the loveliness 
and charm of Maria Ward when he visited Richmond, and that 
he was anxious for her to visit him in France. Her rather early 
death prevented this. John Randolph survived her, and there were 
those who said that until the end these Virginia lovers retained 
“a melancholy interest in each other.” 

There is a mansion in Richmond full of memories of John 
Randolph and Maria Ward; it is the stately edifice on Twelfth 
street known as the Confederate Museum; it was once the White 
House of the Confederacy. This house was built in 1818 by Dr. 
John Brockenborough; once it had a beautiful garden in which 
Maria Ward and John Randolph never walked together, for fate 
had separated them then; but both of them were intimate with 
the Brockenboroughs. John Randolph stayed there during the 
trial of Aaron Burr; he was the foreman of the jury and Dr. 
Brockenborough a member of the jury. What if the walls could 
repeat their conversations then! 

Maria Ward was a close personal friend of Mrs. Brocken¬ 
borough, and when she knew she could never marry her stricken 
lover, she brought his letters to Mrs. Brockenborough sealed with 
wax and carefully tied up and asked her to burn them after her 
death without breaking the seal. This was done. But is it not a 
pity that the love letters of John Randolph could not be read by 
us of such a later time? Imagine the passion of them, the poetry, 
the music of his love-inspired soul! If he swayed hardened men 
as the north wind bends the oaks, how delicately and exquisitely 
would he touch the young, expectant hearts of today. 

No Virginia romance is more touching and tragic than that of 
John Randolph and Maria Ward. He called her his “angel” to 
the hour of his death, and in the faded letter read by his friends 
after his death and so unmistakably penned by his own fingers—he 
writes: “I loved, aye, and was loved again not wisely, but too well.” 



Maria Ward 







Alexander Spotswood: The Lover. 











Alexander Spotswood 













Alexander Spotswood : The Lover. 

W ERE they not picturesque, romantic and courageous, Sir 
Alexander Spotswood and his “Knights of the Golden 
Horseshoe?” “Governor Spotswood, with his silver- 
hilted sword, gilt, and Robert Beverley, with silver-hilted sword 
and no gilt,” astride their mettled steeds to hunt deer and bear, 
and mountains. 

Alexander Spotswood had temperament, too, not so insinuating, 
perhaps, as that of John Randolph or of Sally Cary, or Dolly 
Madison, but enough to give him fine distinction apart from his 
unmistakable efficiency and courage. He, too, followed Marl¬ 
borough and was wounded in the breast at Blenheim, bringing with 
him to Virginia the proof of it in the shape of a four pound cannon 
ball, which he loved to show to his guests at Germanna, his home. 

He was the first of his name in America and arrived within the 
Capes of Virginia June 20, 1710. He landed at Kequotan (now 
Hampton), embarked from his good ship and rode in a Bedford 
Galley to Jamestown, going thence to Greenspring, where he passed 
the night. 

Sir William Berkeley, of Greenspring, had been gathered to his 
fathers, and the Ludwells reigned at Greenspring in his stead. It 
was a good moment for Greenspring, the flowers in its historic 
garden were all a-blowing, and how refreshing must have been a 
draft from that “spring at my Lady Berkeley’s, called Greenspring, 
whereof I have been told the water is so very cold that ’tis danger¬ 
ous drinking thereof in summertime, it having proved of fatal 
consequence to several.” 

Alexander Spotswood was a promoter, an autocrat and also an 
aristocrat, not so offensively so as Berkeley, but charmingly and 


108 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


convincingly so, creating a romantic epoch to which it is well to 
revert in these days of frank democracy. 

He lived in the palace in Williamsburg, on that exquisite palace 
green which some of us have tried valiantly to preserve in its 
romantic entirety, but failed. The “Palace” was a “magnificent 
structure, finished and beautiful, with gates, fine gardens, walks, 
a canal, orchards and a cupola or lantern, illuminating most of the 
town on birthnights and other nights of occasional rejoicing.” 
How suggestive and quaint this illuminating lantern, sending forth 
its scintillating, commemorating and congratulating rays, earnest 
of the light and love in the heart of the Governor, radiating to all 
sorts and conditions of men. 

The aristocracy went to the Palace, and all who were not of the 
aristocracy were well content to get peeps of the brave finery, 
glittering jewels and proud faces through the gates and along the 
shaded thoroughfares. 

Spotswood stood for many things; some he accomplished ; others 
he did not. He put a bit in the teeth of the honorable council— 
it had been having a good, old, domineering way; he changed the 
mode of granting land and collecting quit-rents. He suspended 
the mighty Ludwell, projected an Indian school, developed mines, 
rebuilt William and Mary, and built the famous octagon Powder 
Horn in Williamsburg. Would he hold our mind’s eye, a gay and 
irresistible cavalier, picturesque and compelling, if he had not led 
his gay and thirsty Horseshoe Knights on that memorial transmon- 
tane expedition? 

His love afifairs are rather vague. He married, in 1724, Anne 
Butler Bryan, or Brayne, daughter of Richard Bryan, or Brayne, 
of Westminster. James Butler, duke of Ormond, was her god¬ 
father. Not one love-letter from either the famous Governor or 
his sweetheart has been preserved. If he pursued love as he did 
the deer and the Blue Ridge, the chase must have been satisfac¬ 
torily ardent; but we have no proof as we have it of Randolph 
and Washington; he wrote many, many letters, but not a love- 
letter can we find. 

In 1725 John Pratt writes from London: “Col. Spotswood 
was married about a month ago to a daughter of Mr. Braine 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


109 


(another spelling). Ye young lady is said to be wonderfully 
pretty, but no money.” Her portrait, instead of being wonderfully 
pretty, displays a rather stiff and forbidding countenance. 

We have no evidence that Spotswood was interested in anybody 
else but Anne Butler Bryane. William Byrd, the irrepressible 
gossip, does say in his delightful account of a visit to Germanna: 
“I observed my old friend to be very uxorious and exceedingly 
fond of his children. This was so opposite to the maxims he used 
to preach up before he was married that I could not forbear rub¬ 
bing up the memory of them. But he gave a good-natured turn 
to his change of sentiments by alleging that whoever brings a poor 
gentlewoman into so solitary a place, far from all her friends 
and acquaintances, would be ungrateful not to use her and all that 
belongs to her with all possible tenderness.” 

Why did he not say: “Will! Don’t mention the past! Anne’s 
beauty, virtue, and strange heroic content sweep my heart, even of 
its memories. I do not know them; her charms and affection drop 
a curtain between myself and my indiscretions. I forget that any 
other woman ever lived but herself.” This would have created 
another Anne; another Alexander. 

In his “progress to the mines” William Byrd stopped at Ger¬ 
manna and with him into the house jauntily entered, also, a pet 
deer, who, seeing his graceful litheness in one of the glasses, 
leaped madly for it, not only smashing the glass but falling back 
on Mrs. Spotswood’s daintily-set tea table, making “a terrible 
fracas among the china.” 

Byrd asserts that Mrs. Spotswood was frightened, but “ ’twas 
worth all the damage to shew the moderation and good humour 
with which she bore this disaster.” 

Mrs. Spotswood had a sister, Miss Thecky, who saluted the 
delightful William civilly and was also so kind as to bid him 
welcome. 

Miss Thecky was the housekeeper, her coffee was weak and she 
had Michaelmas goose for dinner of her own raising. They all 
rode out together and forded the river, striking into the rich lands 
where the ginseng bore scarlet berries. Later, they walked in the 
horseshoe, found Mrs. Spotswood looking at the little animals 


110 Love Stories of Famous Virginians 

“with which the ladies amuse themselves and furnish the table.” 
Mrs. Spotswood was tender-hearted, for she wept when any of 
them were killed. 

From this vivid picture, limned by William Byrd, we fancy that 
Mrs. Spotswood was not domestic, that she was tender-hearted 
and that she loved her husband. She bore him two sons and two 
daughters; one daughter was the ancestor of Patrick Henry and 
the other of Robert E. Lee. 

Perhaps Anne Butler Brayne had captured Spotswood’s heart 
before he left England in 1710, and he prudently waited till his 
fortune was sufficiently made to go and bring her, as his wedded 
wife, to Virginia. 

The high-light of his life is the adventurous romance that did 
establish for his lordly self the fact of doing something that no 
man had done before. 

He set off from Williamsburg in 1716, when Nature reveled in 
its last wild exuberance. Where he crossed the river we cannot 
say, but he stopped at Mr. Robert Beverley’s home, in King and 
Queen, and picked up Mr. Fontaine. 

They had a fine time at Mr. Beverley’s, for his mind had turned 
to vine and wines, and they diverted themselves indoors “with 
wine of Mr. Beverley’s making,” and outdoors with Mr. Beverley’s 
vineyard that produced the wine. Although Mr. Beverley’s house 
was plainly furnished (not a curtain even to the beds), Mr. 
Beverley’s cellar was not to be despised, and it was in a jolly mood 
that they fared forth to King William county the next day. The 
weather being warm, they went thence, in Mr. Beverley’s chaise, 
horses and riders following. 

No place in the Colony was more hospitable or elegant than the 
mansion of Augustine Moore, called Chelsea, there they again 
stopped, and the next day Mr. Moore joined the adventurers. 

Gradually they picked up Mr. Todd, who unfortunately fell sick 
of a fever and had to go back; Dr. Robinson, Mr. Taylor, Mr. 
Mason, Mr. Brooke, Captains Crowder and Smith, negroes and 
Indians. The cavalcade was well supplied with riding and pack 
horses, liquors and necessary food. 

August 29 they were well on the way, civilization receding fast. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


111 


The first night out, they made great fires and drank healths; 
eating was so secondary that it is not mentioned. In the morning 
the blare of a trumpet re-echoed in primeval wilds and waked 
them up. In the almost impenetrable jungle of August-nature, 
they were beset by hornets, rattle-snakes and other creatures; but 
what cared they? The eternal, whipping sense of quest was upon 
them, and they had the magic of destruction for all their enemies. 

On they rode, spirited thoroughbreds stepping the wilderness 
of bush and briar, thorn and pricking insect! A gay song now 
and then; always a stop to fire a volley and to drink the king’s 
health! 

In the dark forest recesses the eyes of elk and buffalo gleamed 
and stared. What was coming? A well-aimed volley and the 
question was answered. Wild grapes hung so thickly that they 
plucked and ate them on their way. English songs echoed through 
the woods, where darkness had ever flung its shadowy pall, and 
wherever they stopped a camp was chistened, “Spotswood,” 
“Beverley” and so forth. The king’s health was drunk and the 
governor’s, and the healths of the individuals of that remarkable 
cavalcade. 

Little wild things of the wild, unpruned forest glided swiftly 
away as they approached; deer, bear and foxes lost nerve at the 
sight of the noisy cavalcade so boldly plunging through their own 
tightly interlaced, primeval thickets. Indians, with their keen 
ears always to the ground, heard their prophetic approach and 
met them sixty strong: young men with feathers in hair and ears, 
painted faces and black locks cut in the fashion of a coxcomb, 
naked, but for their streaming blankets; young women with long 
hair and deerskin drapery, met them in weird silence, their pic¬ 
turesque and fantastic attitude a question: Have you reckoned 
with us? A question in silence, an answer in silence. Victorious 
Englishman, conquered red man, go their several ways this blister¬ 
ing August day. 

They always pitched their tents by running water, kindled their 
camp-fire quickly. Sometimes rousing Bruin from his tree-top 
sleep, Bruin startling white man as he tumbled from his cradle- 
tree into their midst. 


112 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


If he had not made that memorable transmontane adventure, 
some other man would have later explored the wilderness: but 
Alexander Spotswood first heard the call of the beckoning West 
and hearkened. 

Up they sweep, reaching that part of the James river “where a 
man may jump over it.” There they pitch their tents again, while 
the axemen blaze the trail higher and higher, till the king’s great 
river “runs no bigger than a man’s arm from under a big stone.” 

They are attaining the goal, yonder the foot-hills begin to roll, 
and presently the mighty Appalachians are in sight! Load arms, 
all! Yes, there they stood in sight of the billowing, blue mountain 
line; stood, all in close attention, until they suddenly remembered 
the king’s health. His they drank in champagne, then fired a 
volley; the princess’ health in old Burgundy, then fired a volley; 
the governor’s health in brandy, then fired a volley. 

Sir Alexander endeavored to carve letters upon a stone, but the 
stone was too hard, so he couldn’t do it. Higher and higher, when, 
lo! Mr. Beverley’s horse stumbled and down Mr. Beverley and 
the horse rolled to the bottom of the hill. No bones were broken. 

Nearer and nearer, and by September 5, 1716, Alexander Spots¬ 
wood and his Horseshoe Knights were at Swift Run Gap; it was a 
clear, still day, and the eternal hills, in their misty splendor, 
whispered in their listening ears the verities of the ages. The 
king’s health was drunk by all the company and the highest peak 
christened Mount George; the adventurers had gained the limit of 
the great watershed from which pellucid water flowed, which 
Spotswood christened “The Euphrates.” It is now our silvery 
Shenandoah. 

It was not all a mad, intoxicating holiday. Death invaded the 
ranks of that brave cavalcade and two men died with measles and 
one from the bite of a rattlesnake. 

Spotswood was back in Williamsburg September 17, after being 
away six weeks. 

Alexander Spotswood led his Horseshoe Knights to a peak of 
the Alleghanies, and their Anglo-Saxon eyes first beheld the en¬ 
chanting valley beyond? Did they visualize the human stream 
soon to flow across a continent to make it big and great? 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


113 


As they peered beyond the everlasting hills, did they feel the 
beckoning possibilities of the land over yonder? 

To each of his knights Spotswood presented a golden horseshoe 
set with precious stones. 

Back they wended their difficult way through sultry September 
woods, but at journey’s end there was no Lady Anne, virtuously 
awaiting her venturesome Alexander. Spotswood was still a 
bachelor and not young, as youth was counted then. 

This adventure made history. As the Horseshoe Knights pro¬ 
ceeded, they knew not whether to sea or to sand, they led the yet 
unceasing army which even today marches westward. 

They broke the silence of an undiscovered country. The spirit 
of Alexander Spotswood escaped from the bars of civilized Vir¬ 
ginia, and laughed at rattlesnake, wild beasts and Indians, which 
might have dismayed it, to visualize, from a mountain top, other 
victories for the Anglo-Saxon race. 

No wife awaited his return to Germanna, and it was eight years 
afterwards that he went to London to marry Anne Butler Brayne 
and brought her to a “famous town” (again Colonel Byrd), “which 
consists of Colonel Spotswood’s enchanted castle on one side of 
the street and a baker’s dozen of ruinous tenements on the other. 
There had also been a chapel about a bow-shot from the Colonel’s 
house, at the end of the avenue of cherry trees, but some pious 
people had lately burnt it down with intent to have one nearer 
their own homes.” So, according to Colonel Byrd, Lady Spots¬ 
wood, outside her castle, might find ample opportunity for service 
if she chose. Their children came happily and gradually, bestow¬ 
ing upon succeeding generations ancestral consolation. Home life 
as far as can be ascertained was peaceful and only harshly broken 
when Governor Spotswood, man of action and aventure, minded 
again to go to war. This time across the seas. He never embarked, 
for death held him, unwilling prisoner, before he ever sailed, while 
most probably Anne, his faithful wife, was praying for him at 
Germanna. 

In 1740 he was commissioned Major General to conduct the 
expedition against Carthagena, but died before departure at 
Annapolis, Maryland, at the age of sixty-four and a married life 


114 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


of sixteen years. The fire of youth, however, was not dead in the 
heart of the widowed Anne, for she fell in love with a handsome 
and fascinating parson, entirely against her good judgment. 

The Reverend John Thompson was a Scotsman, of birth and 
education, and the parish priest of Spotswood’s widow. He fell 
in love with her and she fell in love with him. We are told that 
he was very handsome, and his wooing was charming, perhaps 
even more ardent than that of the leader of the Horseshoe Knights. 
His proposal of marriage was accepted, their engagement, perhaps 
sealed with the usual demonstrations, when the widow’s heart 
failed. Was it exactly as it should be, for the widow of a Gover¬ 
nor, a general and so forth, to marry a clergyman ? 

The Reverend John Thompson was equal to the emergency, 
and he has left a letter which is one of the best arguments in 
the realm of romance. “Madam; By diligently perusing your letter 
I perceive there is a material argument, which I ought to have 
answered, upon which your strongest objection against completing 
my happiness would seem to depend, viz.: That you would incur 
ye censures of ye world for marrying a person of my station and 
character, by which I understand that you think it a diminution 
of your honor and ye dignity of your family to marry a person in 
ye station of a clergyman. 

“I make no doubt madam, but yt you will readily grant yt no 
man can be employed in any work more honorable than what imme¬ 
diately relates to ye King of kings and Lord of lords, and to ye 
salvation of souls immortal in their nature and redeemed by the 
blood of the Son of God.” 

On and on the Reverend John proceeds through pages of 
specious argument, each sentence, no doubt, most acceptable to 
a noble widow, known as My Lady Spotswood, and who took that 
pride in titles common to her sex. 

But the parson was young, even younger than herself; hand¬ 
some and of insinuating personality. If she could see her way, in 
dignity, to a marriage with him, she feign would do so. 

Methinks the closing sentences of this most reasonable document 
scored for the parson. “And, therefore, if a gentleman of this 
sacred and honorable character should be married to a lady, though 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


115 


of ye greatest extraction and most excellent personal qualities 
(which I am sensible you are endowed with), it can be no dis¬ 
grace to her nor her family nor draw ye censures of ye world upon 
them for such an action. And therefore, dear Madam, your 
argument being refuted, you can no longer consistently refuse to 
consummate my happiness. 


“May, 1742.” 


“John Thompson.” 


The “Lady” was fully persuaded, and the parson won. 

The letter convinced the hesitating lady. Two years after the 
death of Alexander Spotswood she married the Reverend John 
Thompson, bore him two children, and their connubial bliss seems 
to have been entirely satisfactory. 




















' 




' 






* 

) 


• ; 
























" 




* 




y , 








































/.*! /. ' i--.\ ■ j 








/ 






































■ 


















William Byrd: The Lover. 








































* 


















. 
























































- 








1 1 1 . ISH ■ 



I 

















l HH gfl 



/ 





Lucy Parke 































William Byrd: The Lover. 

T HE story of the ages is colored by striking and tempera¬ 
mental personalities; be they good or bad no matter, they 
charm and that is enough. Our first century, which was 
the sixteenth century of our Lord, turns to Pocahontas, John 
Smith (not to John Rolfe), to Cicely Jordan, Sarah Harrison 
and Nathaniel Bacon for that temperament which gives always to 
the romance of love or the romance of adventure. Their stories 
never grow old. 

William Byrd holds the palm for personality in Virginia’s early 
second century—he died in 1743. He was neither an idler nor 
unduly self-indulgent, but still he had a good time and so stamped 
his individuality upon his own day that we cannot get rid of him 
in ours. 

His father was the son of a London goldsmith, an avocation of 
no more social distinction then than it is now; his maternal grand¬ 
father that Thomas Stegge, who was sent over by Parliament in 
1651 to make Virginia and Maryland behave themselves. He did 
this satisfactorily and for his good service he had the ghastly 
reward of being drowned at sea on his way back to England, 
probably to render his good account. He lived near Westover, 
made his son his heir, who, in turn, left his estate to his nephew, 
the first William Byrd, which legacy most probably was the 
beginning of the second William Byrd’s immense fortune. 

William Byrd, I, married Mary, daughter of Wareham Hors- 
manden, and settled on his Uncle Stegge’s fertile acres near Rich¬ 
mond, kept store, traded with the Indians, had many by-interests, 
became a member of the House of Burgesses and the Council, 
sympathized with Nathaniel Bacon, and used much of his immense 


120 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


fortune in forwarding his laudable ambitions for his only son. 
The first William Byrd had daughters, but about them not much is 
known. 

Ursula married Robert Beverley, and her tomb at Jamestown 
states that “she died a mother at less than seventeen.” Nothing is 
known of Mary; time and distance have swallowed her up. Susan 
died in London, where three of the Byrd children were sent “to 
learn to be gentlemen and ladies for their own good,” and where 
Susan married John Brayne. 

In reading these accounts we can but smile at the attitude of the 
age to youth. Susan and Ursula, daughters of the first William 
Byrd, were at school at Hackney till their devoted parent thought 
they knew enough and decided that they should return to Virginia; 
but, alas, no sooner were they out of school than war was declared 
between France and England, and the father was afraid his daugh¬ 
ters would be captured, and ordered them to remain where they 
were. Nothing else could be done except to ask shelter of an 
Uncle Horsmanden, who had married a very fine lady. 

But the girls did something—heaven knows what—and Uncle 
Horsmanden did not fail to report it to papa, and papa, after the 
manner of fathers, did not fail to be seriously offended: writing 
in rather restrained wrath, and “trusting Mr. Horsmanden and 
his lady may see a numerous progeny who may live happily in the 
world without troubling their relations.” 

Then the girls were switched from their critical relations else¬ 
where, and whether Susan ever came home is unknown. Her 
father thought that Ursula had enough schooling (she must have 
been about ten years old, for this was in 1691, and in 1698 Ursula 
died, aged sixteen years and eleven months, and left a son), and 
brought her home as soon as he could. 

William was the high light of the family, and his father’s joy 
and pride. He saw little of him, but in his absence wrote the most 
anxious and affectionate letters, and was perfectly willing to live 
in solitude at Westover while his brilliant son made friends and 
fame in London. 

Uncle Stegge’s land, which the first William Byrd inherited, lay 
in that lush, green lowland so plain from Chimborazo and just 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


121 


below Manchester. There the Byrds lived in a little stone house, 
staunchly built to defend them from the Indians. Fortune in¬ 
creased rapidly, and with it the desire for a more pretentious 
dwelling. So across the falls Byrd came and built a mansion where 
the penitentiary now stands, calling it Belvidere. It was “an 
elegant villa” with “two storeys, dormer windows and wings,” but 
again it was too lonely, too remote, and the majesty of Westover 
was planned and accomplished. 

There is something pathetic in the passing of the first William 
Byrd. Amid his imported and magnificent furnishing, on his 
lordly estate, his wife dead, his daughters dead, one son dead, and 
William in London, he died absolutely alone. He had to look to 
his housekeeper, Joanna Jarratt, and Joab Marat, his body servant, 
for physical and spiritual consolation. He felt death upon him 
and sent in haste for his friend, William Randolph, of Turkey 
Island, who “came at once in a boat, though the weather was bad,” 
received instruction about the will from dying lips, did what he 
could for the man of wealth, who, although his dream had, in a 
way, been realized, died on a remote estate with not a member of 
his family to soothe his last hour. 

His will was brief : “To Mary, his baby, three hundred pounds; 
to Susan Brayne, one hundred pounds; to William Beverly, fifty 
pounds; to his housekeeper a small remembrance,” and all the rest 
—negroes, lands, cattle, furniture, plate—everything—to his only 
son, the famous William Byrd, then enjoying life in the city of 
London. 

Wherever this William went he left the trail of his temperament, 
his remarkable personality. He was brilliant, and handsome and 
cultured for his day, but above and beyond all that he was charm¬ 
ing, sympathetic, humorous, delightful. His father’s anxiety that 
he should have everything “fitting for him” is touching; and he 
did have it: the society of lords and ladies, travel, education, all 
the luxuries that an adoring father could give him, and in the 
end one of the largest fortunes of his day. 

When he returned to Westover to take possession the seven¬ 
teenth century was closing. Immediately he was put into the 
House of Burgesses and later in the Council and for the remainder 


122 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


of his life he took a leading part in all affairs of the Colony. But 
posterity is grateful, that with all of his political aspirations and 
accomplishments he took time to write, and to be fascinating, and 
to leave behind him a picture of his romantic adventures. 

His love affairs were tame, so far as we know; much more so* 
than his temperament would justify. In his late life he wrote to 
a friend who had been with him in London: “I want to see what 
change forty years have wrought in you since we used to intrigue 
together in the Temple. But matrimony has atoned sufficiently for 
such backslidings, and now I suppose you have so little fellow- 
feeling left for the naughty jades that you can order them a good 
whipping without relenting. But though I should be mistaken, 
yet, at least, I hope your conscience, with the aid of threescore and 
ten, has gained a complete victory over your constitution, which 
is almost the case of, sir, yours, etc/’ 

William Byrd’s love-making was, as we find it, extremely nor¬ 
mal. In 1706, two years after his father’s death, he married Lucy, 
the youngest daughter of Colonel Daniel Parke. Her portrait 
shows a comely woman, with the serene and gentle countenance 
of the ladies of her day. We cannot find much about her personal 
characteristics; perhaps, she made a good foil for her brilliant 
husband’s energy, was happy to be quiet at Westover with the 
children, and ever ready to welcome him when he returned. For 
if with motor cars, steam cars and yachts the business man of 
today finds himself away from home much of his time, what 
leisure had William Byrd at Westover with his official duties, 
and his trips to “Eden,” the “Mines,” and other places? 

His father-in-law was the aristocratic “rounder” of his day. 
Handsome and plausible, he was in touch with the Marlboroughs in. 
England, and was aide to the duke in his Low Country campaigns, 
who assigned to him the great honor of bearing the good news of 
“Blenheim” to the queen. Anne presented to him her miniature, 
set in diamonds, and made him governor of the Leeward Islands, 
where his conduct, certainly, was in favor neither of God nor man, 
and where he died ignominiously in a riot. His portrait, notwith¬ 
standing, is perfectly lovely, and he wears Queen Anne’s miniature 
on his breast. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


123 


He worried William Byrd almost to death in his life, and after¬ 
ward, as Byrd himself has wisely or, perhaps, unwisely recorded. 
“A will (Daniel Parke’s) was produced which he had made not 
long before his death.” By that will he had left all his estate in 
England and in Virginia to his eldest daughter, Mrs. Custis, and 
his estate in the West Indies (twice the value of the rest) to Lucy 
Chester, which he had too much reason to believe was his own 
daughter * * *; and as for “Mrs. Byrd, who never had 

offended her father but was marryed, not only with his consent but 
with his earnest desire,” she was bequeathed one thousand pounds. 

“Not only with his consent but with his earnest desire” suggests 
that Daniel Parke thought the young William Byrd a rattling 
good catch, and the sooner his daughters were off his unstable 
hands the better. 

Daniel Parke, I., so familiarly and favorably memorialized in 
old “Bruton,” in Williamsburg, was a pattern of virtue by which 
his son by no means measured his conduct, and as we read the 
mural tablet we can but smile, for at the same time we see young 
Daniel Parke, the father of Mrs. Byrd, dragging from the pew of 
Philip Ludwell the wife of Parson Blair, of Jamestown. Ludwell 
was his father-in-law, the distinguished Philip of “Greenspring,” 
and Parke, disliking Parson Blair intensely, decided that his wife 
should not sit in the same pew with any of his family. Whether 
Mrs. Blair resisted, or whether the priest, people or beadle remon¬ 
strated with Daniel Parke, the records do not tell. 

Lucy Parke Byrd did not in the least take after her irascrible 
and overbearing parent, but made William Byrd’s life so happy at 
quiet Westover that he was sorry when business took him back to 
London, showing conclusively that his domestic life was beautiful. 
William Byrd had a splendid disposition, as we say of more ordin¬ 
ary people, and his history gives one the impression of a merry, 
light-hearted fellow, always able to find interest and amusement 
in life, and taking whatever came philosophically. He even writes 
that the pleasures of London had lost their taste, for his heart 
was with his family at Westover. 

Lucy Parke and Evelyn, his daughter, stayed at home, and 
another little girl came while her father was away. So homesick 


124 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


did he become for his wife and children that he sent for them; 
they arrived in London in summertime and in December poor Lucy 
Parke Byrd died of smallpox. Her husband makes the following 
picture of her, which matches the charming portrait which used to 
hang at Brandon. The letter is written to his brother-in-law, John 
Custis: 

When I wrote last I little expected that I should be forced to tell you 
the very melancholy news of my dear Lucy’s death by the very same cruel 
distemper that destroyed her sister. She was taken with an insupportable 
pain in her head. The doctor soon discovered the ailment to be smallpox, 
and we thought it best to tell her the danger. She received the news without 
the least fright, and was pursuaded she would live, till the next day she 
died, which happened in twelve hours from the time she was taken. Gracious 
God, what pains did she take to make a voyage hither to seek a grave! 
(Who could so have expresed it but William Byrd?) No stranger ever 
met with more respect in a strange land than she had done here from many 
persons of distinction, who all pronounced her an honor to Virginia. Alas, 
how proud was I of her, and how severely am I punished for it. But I 
can dwell no longer on so afflicting a subject, much less can I think of 
anything else, therefore I can only recommend myself to your pity and 
am as much as anyone can be, dear brother, your most affectionate, humble 
servant, W. Byrd. 

This was in 1716. His first grief over, he mingled as he always 
did with the best and most delightful society, but he was unusually 
loyal and did not marry until 1724, when he yielded to the charms 
of a lovely young widow, Maria Taylor, of Kensington. 

His daughter Anne was born in England in 1725, and in 1726 
he was back at Westover. The two romances of his heart are not 
exciting or abnormal; he simply loved and married two gentle¬ 
women of good birth and sufficient beauty. We have no love 
letters of crimson passion, nor one single suspicion of the slightest 
connubial infelicity; both of his married states, for all that is 
known, flowed gently, as sweet Avon or any other placid stream; 
and it is the romance of William Byrd’s adventure which shows the 
red blood, the courage, and curiosity of him. 

It has been said by one of his chroniclers, and there have been 
many, that his “History of the Dividing Line,” the “Journey to the 
Land of Eden,” and his “Progress to the Mines,” undoubtedly, 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


125 


gave him place as the sprightliest and most genial native American 
writer before Franklin. He puts himself so in his work. His 
descriptions of that remarkable dividing line between Virginia and 
North Carolina are so vivid that one can almost see that slender, 
graceful, merry figure battling in the jungle, subduing the wild 
things, and telling his good stories about the camp fires. 

Literary people of his day approved fragments of his descrip¬ 
tion, and Mark Catesby wished for more of it and wrote Byrd to 
that effect. The master of Westover answered that he did not 
seem able to finish the work, “for I am always engaged on some 
scheme for the infant colony. The present scheme is to found a 
city at the falls of the James.” 

Richmond! Does the impalpable, delightful, unusual atmos¬ 
phere of this city on the James owe its existence to the fascinating 
personality of its founder? Did his prayers and wishes for it 
give it something of himself which war, nor fire, nor commer¬ 
cialism, nor time is able to dispel ? 

That “Dividing Line!” How many have read it? It is delight¬ 
ful, from the first humorous description of the queen’s acceptance 
of tobacco from Sir Walter Raleigh. Thus he has it: “The queen 
graciously accepted of it, but finding her stomach sicken after 
two or three whiffs, it was presently whispered by the Earl of 
Leicester that Sir Walter had certainly poisoned her. But her 
majesty soon recovering her disorder, obliged the Countess of 
Nottingham and all her maids to smoke a whole pipe out amongst 
them.” Poor ladies. 

Toward the end he writes: “We had now, upon the whole, 
been out six weeks, and had traveled at least six hundred miles 
and no small part of that distance on foot. Below toward the sea 
side our course lay through marshes, swamps and great waters; 
and, above, over steep hills, craggy rocks and thickets hardly 
penetrable.” But that line which he courageously assisted to run 
will stand forever as the true boundary betwixt the governments 
of Virginia and North Carolina. 

Those six hundred miles proved a romantic adventure to the 
“Black Swan” of Virginia. He who had mingled in the courts of 
Europe and was the master of lordly Westover, plunges through 


126 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


the jungle of the Dismal Swamp like the true sport that he was. 
His description of Curratuck inlet, where “the breakers fly over 
with a horrible sound and at the same time afford a very wild 
prospect/’ is an epic, and his picture of the wild flowers, the wild 
beasts, and the skies and the winds, is the essence and the prose- 
poetry of real romance. 

Everybody ought to read it except North Carolinians, for it 
might make any citizen of that remarkable and energetic State 
mad—even today. It certainly would make them a little bit doubt¬ 
ful of the veracity of William Byrd, and that would be a pity. 

Who has been into the gloomy, leafy recesses of Dismal Swamp ? 
Whosoever he be will know this picture: “Neither bird nor beast, 
insect or reptile came in view. Doubtless the eternal shade that 
broods over this mighty bog, and. hinders the sunbeams from 
blessing the ground, makes it an uncomfortable habitation for 
anything that has life (then the humor:) Not so much as a 
Zealand frog could endure so agueish a situation.” 

Flashes of this irresistible humor illuminate almost every page 
of this “Dividing Line.” “It was now Sunday which we had liked 
to have spent in fasting as well as prayer, for our men taking 
no care for the morrow, like good Christians, but bad travelers, 
had improvidently devoured all their meat for supper.” A fat 
bear saved the situation. 

William Dandridge, the father of Martha Washington, accom¬ 
panied William Byrd on this famous expedition, which was con¬ 
cluded in 1728. In it were all the elements of romantic adventure, 
and, if it were put in form for boys to read, it would not only 
thrill but inform. Not even the wilds of darkest Africa held more 
threatening beasts and certainly no more exquisite flowers than 
this wilderness between Virginia and its neighbor State. Yet 
through the six weeks the gay and polished gentlemen never drew 
back from the most difficult moment of his dramatic adventure, 
but plunged ahead like any backwoodsman, heartening up the com¬ 
pany with his good humor and his pleasantries. 

These early Virginians were not content with stores and fields, 
cattle and the bounty of the magnificent streams, but they wanted 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 127 

also gold and silver and perhaps precious stones. In 1733, Wil¬ 
liam Byrd was off again on another romantic and wearisome but 
pleasure-giving adventure. He was determined to find out per¬ 
sonally what else Virginia could give. 

On the Dividing-Line” expedition there were commissioners 
for Virginia and for North Carolina, surveyors for Virginia and 
for North Carolina, men and a chaplain—exactly fifty souls. On 
this famous Journey to the Land of Kden”—and where was the 
land of Eden ?—there were eleven white men, three Indians, three 
negroes, twenty horses and four dogs. The land of Eden, to find 
which our William set off so jauntily September 11, 1733, lay 
somewhere between the Dan and Irvine waters. 

He “recommended his family to the protection of the Almighty, 
crossed the river with two servants and four horses and rode to 
Colonel Munford’s; there they picked up Mr. Banister and went 
off to Major Munford’s, who made Mr. Byrd ‘the complement to 
leave the arms of his pretty wife, and to lye on the cold ground 
for his sake, the pretty wife, meanwhile, chiding him with her 
eyes.’ ” 

They fortified themselves with a “beefsteake,” kissed Mrs. 
Munford and rode off. An old Indian, “Shacco-Will,” was to 
guide them to a silver-mine and to “comfort his heart Colonel 
Byrd gave him a bottle of rum, with which he made himself very 
happy, and all the family very miserable, by the horrible noise he 
made all night.” 

Every disappointment, every mishap on these romantic journeys 
William Byrd treats as a joke; they were but incidents in a life¬ 
time. When “Tom Short, who promised to go with them, stayed 
behind because he had married a wife,” he cheered their several 
hearts with gay philosophy and three bottles of pretty good 
Madeira, which made them talk of the copper mines hopefully. 
“Thus did we build not only castles but cities in the air.” His 
mind was full of our Richmond and our Petersburg then. 

Of nature he continually makes graphic and speaking pictures. 
The thunder often rumbled frightfully among the tall trees that 
surrounded us in that low ground; clap succeeded lightning the 


128 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


same instant and made all tremble before it, but blessed be God, it 
spent its fury upon a tall oak just by our camp!” Always, the 
optimist! 

With what keen delight he “knocked down a brace of bucks!” 
With what joy did he watch “the woodpeckers tap the sugar trees 
for the sweet juice that flows out of them.” When Indians sur¬ 
prised them he soothed his apprehensive fellow-travelers by assur¬ 
ing them that “they would not venture to hurt them.” With the 
enthusiasm of a boy he cut his initials on one of these sugar trees. 
Suddenly awakened from deep sleep by what he supposed an 
Indian whistle, he made every one stand manfully to his arms in 
a moment, and went quietly to sleep again when he found the 
whistle “to be nothing but the nocturnal note of a little harmless 
bird that inhabits those woods.” He even makes a joke of tooth¬ 
ache, certainly, a test of a good disposition, and thus describes his 
mode of getting rid of it. 

“I had an impertinent tooth in my upper jaw that made me chew 
with great caution * * * I could grind not a biscuit. Tooth- 

drawers we had none amongst us * * * and I contrived to get 
rid of my troublesome companion by cutting a caper. I caused a 
twine to be fastened round the root of my tooth, about a fathom in 
length, and then tied the other end to the snag of a log, I bent my 
knees enough to make me spring vigorously * * * the force of 
the leap drew out the tooth.” 

He coquetted with each landlady as he ate her roast beef and 
cherry pie, and never for one moment lost his spirits, although 
he was then fifty-eight years old. The joy of meeting again his 
family in health made him forget instantly all the fatigues of the 
journey. Going and coming his wife and children either sped or 
hailed the parting guest. On one occasion “Mrs. Byrd and her 
little governor, my son, accompanied me half way to the ‘falls’ 
in the chariot, where we halted not far from a purling stream, 
and upon the stump of a propagate oak picked the bones of a piece 
of roast beef.” 

We can see them now, he gay, suitably accoutered, making joke 
to conceal the pain of parting! she in a “caleche” bonnet with full 
skirts tubbing around her and the “little governor” in Eton jacket 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


129 


and long pants, filling his father’s heart with loving expectation 
which was never realized. 

William was genial and loving, translating nature and human 
nature freely, with an astute but restrained eye for all ladies, 
noticing to a nicety their mental and physical peculiarities. Can’t 
we see Madame de Graffenriedt when he tells us “she smiles on one 
side of her face?” He was frequently exceedingly coarse, which 
was a habit of his day; he was formally religious, but with evident 
pleasure on his various journeys did he put aside his Sunday 
devotions for a hunt or a chase. 

He was born in 1674, and his adolescence was passed in the 
most elegant society of England. Byron said of Tom Moore: 
“Little Tommy loves a lord,” and so might it be said of young 
Will Byrd. In his latest days he was still corresponding with 
them, but no doubt he gave them as much as they gave him. He 
was back in Virginia in 1706 and married to Lucy Parke; sons 
and daughters of whom he seemed exceedingly fond, blessed the 
union. Lucy died; he married Maria Taylor, and constantly ex¬ 
presses his devotion to her; more sons and daughters, and another 
romance in the sad story of his daughter, Evelyn! Romantic 
adventures, great wealth and closing years in peace and plenty at 
Westover, maidservants and manservants, slaves to do his bidding, 
and witnesses of his past experience in the portraits on his walls! 

He had books in numbers, flowers and trees and princely seclu¬ 
sion and quietude. What more did he want? A coequal son to 
succeed him. The family, as most families will, began the down¬ 
grade at his death and no member of it has in any way equaled 
the second William Byrd. 

William III. was mediocre; he married, first, Elizabeth Carter, 
of Shirley, he then being at the mature age of nineteen and she 
sixteen years. They quarreled terribly, and it is said she killed 
herself with the aid of a wardrobe. We, who are acquainted with 
the ponderous mahogany affairs of her home, can see that she 
could easily do it if she minded to tilt it over. 

Within six months after Elizabeth’s tragic death William III. 
married Mary Willing, of Philadelphia, whose surname has per¬ 
sistently clung to her descendants. When she had been his wife 


130 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


seventeen years he followed the example of his first wife and 
took his own life. We are told that “being infatuated with play, 
his affairs at his death were in a deranged state.” 

So the splendid fortune begun by the son of a London goldsmith 
and bravely kept up by the “Black Swan” was unpardonably 
squandered in the third generation as fortunes are prone to be. 



Cate at Westover. 












Cyrus Griffin: The Lover. 




Cyrus Griffin : The Lover. 

I N going over my mind and my books, I can find no native 
Virginian who committed the indiscretion of wooing the 
daughter of an earl but Cyrus Griffin, of Yorktown and 
Williamsburg. The mere fact of the wooing certainly had the 
flavor of indiscretion upon its face, but Cyrus not only wooed but 
won, and so far as is known the venture was successful. 

It would be interesting to know how the eighteenth century 
Virginians who went for their education to England were socially 
received. We know that William Byrd commingled with the best: 
lords, ladies, painters and poets fell victims to his charm; and he 
married, the second time, an English woman, but by no means 
the daughter of an earl. 

One of the Randolphs married an Englishwoman, and perhaps 
other American students did the same, but we have nothing that 
shows that they did. It is interesting, for many young gentlemen 
went to Oxford and Cambridge, but no fascinating love affairs 
seem to have developed. Virginians returned home and married 
Virginians and scarcely anybody else, which was rather unfor¬ 
tunate, in a way; a little new blood once in a while might have 
injected a broader and healthier viewpoint. 

But to return to Cyrus Griffin. He was a young gentleman of 
birth and breeding, whose ambition took him to Edinburgh town 
in Scotland, for the study of civil law. He was tall and handsome, 
clever and, undoubtedly, ambitious. At the University of Edin¬ 
burgh he was popular for his fresh, untrammeled spirit and his 
bright mind; and we know that he did make friends and that he 
partook of the social life of the country. Among his friends was 
Charles Stuart, Lord Linton, son and heir of the Earl of Traquair. 
When Christmas came Linton invited the Virginian to Traquair 



134 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


for the holidays. Cyrus Griffin accepted the invitation, and then 
and there the trouble began. 

Traquair had three daughters, the Lady Christina, the Lady 
Mary and the Lady Louisa. Only Lady Christina was beautiful, 
so beautiful and so fascinating that Cyrus Griffin could not resist 
her charms; they emboldened him to a declaration, the discovery 
of which shocked and infuriated the proud house that had ex¬ 
tended him an invitation to their Christmas cheer. 

Of course, the love making was kept secret; the Lady Christina 
could but believe that no such denouncement as a matrimonial 
alliance would be tolerated by her proud father; she knew too well 
that Linton would no longer be the friend of the bold Virginian 
when he discovered his sentiment and intention with regard to his 
sister, who, probably, was already carefully reserved for a noble¬ 
man of fame and fortune and certainly of social equality. 

Traquair kept up the formal and romantic customs of its an¬ 
cestry. It had gillies and retainers and pictures and plate long 
before Columbus discovered America, and here was a Virginian 
Cyrus discovering the fascinations of a Lady Christina, and, alas, 
the way of her proud house was to marry an earl’s son or not to 
marry at all. 

There must have been something decidedly reckless and strong 
about young Cyrus. He had been used to the best to be procured 
over yonder where he was born. His people had been the aristo¬ 
crats of that young and distant land. Maternally, he was part 
noble, too, and part Huguenot as well. His grandfather was John 
Bertrand, the Huguenot who sought safety in Virginia; his grand¬ 
mother, Charlotte Jolie, the daughter of a French nobleman. Mary 
Bertrand married Leroy Griffin, of Rappahannock county, and 
they were the parents of Cyrus and of Elizabeth, who married 
Colonel Richard Adams, of Richmond Hill, later called Church 
Hill, after Patrick Henry cried in Old St. John’s, “Give me liberty 
or give me death.” 

Richard Adams is memorialized by a cross street and nothing 
else today, but, probably, the respect of his descendants; but, in 
his time, he was an influential citizen. He had a fine mansion on 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


135 


Church Hill, which has had a varied and romantic experience 
since it passed from his hands. In 1761 he purchased from Wil¬ 
liam Byrd eight hundred and fifty acres of land, extending east¬ 
ward from Shockoe creek and embracing practically the whole of 
Church Hill. He and Thomas Jefferson were close friends, and 
Adams did his best to get Jefferson to build the capital on Church 
Hill; but when Jefferson decided not to do it, Adams never spoke to 
him again. 

News of the courtship and secret marriage of Cyrus and Chris¬ 
tina reached the ears of his brother-in-law, Adams, and Adams at 
once wrote this letter to his London merchant: 

Mr. Cyrus Griffin, who has been several years at Edinburgh studying the 
law, and we expect at this time is at the Temple, has lately been privately 
married to the oldest daughter of the Earl of Traquair; and as we suppose 
his lordship may have some struggles to reconcile himself to such a connection 
with a plebeian, we are apprehensive that Mr. Griffin, from this unexpected 
event, this extraordinary call, may have occasion for more money than he 
can readily command, especially as he has been so unfortunate as to have 
some bills remitted him, returned protested. I shall, therefore, esteem it a 
great favor if you will present him the enclosed and give him any assistance 
in this way in your power. You will find him a solid, sensible young man 
well worthy your notice and friendship. 

We trust that Lady Christina after her coming to Virginia 
found it convenient to thank Mr. Adams for this exceeding 
courtesy to his young brother-in-law. The Earl was, of course, 
furious when he discovered the clandestine courtship of his noble 
daughter by the plebeian whom he had allowed to enter his sacred 
gates. He raved and ranted and the rest of his family, especially 
Linton, who was the first cause of the mischief, was awed by the 
probability of such a tragedy overshadowing the hitherto quiet and 
happy life at Traquair. Cyrus, of course, was never invited to 
Traquair after his secret was out, but love scorns bars or locks 
and by hook or by crook the courtship went clandestinely on. 

Who was the Mercury who bore the love-letters? What was 
the secret spot in which they met? We do not know; but the 
culmination of the romance was a real runaway through forests 
and over dale, and in the wild escape from Traquair and the Earl, 
the Lady Christina fell and broke her ankle. Then this solid, 


136 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


sensible young man, worthy of the notice and friendship of a 
London merchant, took her in his strong arms and bore her over 
brake and over bourne to a parson, who united him and his noble 
Christina in the bonds of holy matrimony. This act estranged the 
young lady forever from her parents; how long the rash young 
couple stayed in Scotland after their marriage we cannot tell, but a 
good while, or Brother-in-law Adams would not have been so 
solicitous about their finances. 

There is certainly romance and adventure, too, in this old story. 
We can almost visualize the young Virginian at a castle, perhaps, 
for the first time, much impressed by the dignity and formality 
of an ancient civilization, contrasting it, no doubt, with the simpler 
life in Rappahannock county in Virginia; a little bit uncertain 
about the various retainers, a little shy as the three young peeresses 
came in, a little reserved in the presence of the earl, yet accepting 
the Christmas cheer, the sports, the unusual hospitality with 
genuine zeal and simple, unaffected enjoyment till—he fell in love. 

How dare he, an unknown personality, studying civil law in a 
strange university, to fall in love with an earl’s daughter? Pedi¬ 
gree miles long, descent immediately from kings, near cousin to 
Mary of Scotland, over the traces of her pathetic life Cyrus had 
been wandering in Edinburgh town. 

Well, he did; and she reciprocated. Perhaps, she was a young 
woman of ideas, of tastes dissimilar to those of her inheritance; 
perhaps, Traquair was dull for her and the life stale and unprofit¬ 
able. Cyrus was handsome and strong, full of the red blood of a 
wild new country, full of ideas, too, with faith in the development 
of his new country into something which would supersede earls 
and their moth-eaten traditions. 

They made love on the sly, they met on the sly, and at last she 
stole from old Traquair, meeting her lover at a sweet trysting 
place, from which they blindly fared forth on life’s greatest adven¬ 
ture. Their way was rough, through moors and brambles and 
woods, over rocks and stones, and in their flight the high-born lady 
fell and broke her slender ankle—of course, it was slender, for 
was she not the daughter of an earl? 

We would like to know more about the early marital struggles 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


137 


of the Lady Christina. Whether she had her first baby in Scot¬ 
land, whether she, who had been reared in pomp and power, passed 
her honeymoon in simple lodgings; certainly, there was no exten¬ 
sive wedding journey on account of the broken ankle, which 
rendered her lame all the rest of her life; it was not “set” soon 
enough, we suspect, and then the mischief was done. 

When Cyrus considered himself sufficiently instructed in civil 
law he returned to Virginia and made a real house and a real 
home in Yorktown, with terraced gardens and a plenty of servants, 
which the Lady Christina trained and directed according to her 
good old Scottish notion. Everybody called her Lady Christina 
and gave her not only the respect which her noble birth deserved, 
but a great deal of love and admiration, too. She retained her 
beauty and her charm which had knocked Cyrus off his feet, and 
maintained a dignity and a poise which was emulated by the other 
ladies of her small social circle. 

Yorktown was fashionable in the eighteenth century; it was not 
until the Revolution that it turned its face to the wall and died. 
Before that it was a lovely, water-girt village, where the most 
exclusive of colonial Virginia dwelt. The bluff rising precipitously 
from the York’s edge was crowned with beautiful mansions and 
gardens falling in terraces to the shore; all gone now but three, the 
Nicholson house, the Digges house and the Nelson house, but 
nowhere can be found more striking and beautiful architecture 
than they preserve. The Griffin house was quite as remarkable 
and perished, too, by fire, as fate seems to have destined so many 
old Virginia homes. 

Inhabitants of the storied village then called it “Little York.” 
The place was projected early in the seventeenth century by 
Nicholas Martian, that Abraham of Virginia genealogy whose 
“seed, verily, are as the sands of the sea.” There the Lightfoots 
lived, the Nicholsons, the Digges, the Griffins, and others, and 
stories come, even unto us, of a sweet life of gentle neighborliness, 
and church and children, and such simple, homely things as make 
for good. 

When the new governors came to wield their sovereign power 
they usually landed at Yorktown, and the leading citizens met them 


138 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


and escorted them all the way to the colonial capital. Cyrus pitched 
his tent in “Little York” and there he and Lady Christina pro¬ 
ceeded to enjoy a tranquil and a useful life. Cyrus at once went 
in for politics as well as the law. He became a member of the 
Continental Congress and was afterward its president. He was 
also judge of the United States Court of Virginia until his death 
at the age of fourscore and ten. His life was full of honor as 
well as domestic happiness and Lady Christina might have fared 
worse had she foregone that rash runaway and married a young 
Scotsman of her own walk in life. She was happy and good, and 
if one is happy and good, what matters all the rest? And it is a 
question whether she did not see more of life in that colonial mart 
where the first custom house stood, than she would have done 
in a remote Scottish highland, coerced and stiffened by the in¬ 
exorable customs of Traquair. 

Cyrus and his lady love had sons and daughters, who inter¬ 
married with the Wallers, the Mercers and the Lewises, and in 
the various families was a rare strain of beauty and of charm, 
which was proudly traced to their beautiful foremother, the Lady 
Christina of Traquair. Her family ignored her, they say; Linton 
was no longer the college chum and certainly not an affectionate 
brother-in-law to Cyrus. The Lady Mary and the Lady Louisa not 
only turned their high noses up at Brother Cyrus, but also at all 
other men, and departed this life in extreme spinsterhood, living 
to be one hundred years old each. 

Tidings of the coming of a little boy, Samuel, to the Yorktown 
home brought a faint softening of their hearts; now and again 
they heard of him; heard that he was a pretty, clever little fellow; 
heard that he did well at school and was about to go to William 
and Mary—why not to Edinborough as his forebears had done ? 

So, over to Yorktown in Virginia came a letter from the old 
earl. He wanted his grandson to have advantages that the Stuarts 
had always enjoyed. Was not Samuel half Stuart, a part of that 
royal house which claimed Mary Queen of Scots? Was it not the 
right of one with the Stuart blood to come over to Edinborough 
and be educated ? 

They let him go, these forgiving Yorktown Griffins, and Samuel 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


139 


studied where his forefathers went, and in holiday time journeyed, 
as his father did, to the castle at Traquair. Linton had never 
married, either—matrimony meant disaster to them all—and the 
old earl and his uncle and aunts made much of young Samuel, 
hoping, no doubt, that he would stay with them, take the Stuart 
name and maintain the Stuart traditions. 

Samuel did not object to Edinborough or Traquair; he loved to 
roam the Scottish moors, to listen to Scottish tales, to eat Scottish 
haggis when its day came, but when the time for him to return to 
Virginia arrived he did not fail to do so. He settled in the town 
of Williamsburg, having graduated as a doctor, and his house was 
the fascinating dormer-windowed gem in which Mrs. Cynthia 
Washington Coleman once lived, and in which the painting of John 
Randolph of Roanoke, by Gilbert Stuart, hung on the paneled 
wall. The house faced the courthouse green and contained many 
reminders of the Lady Christina when Samuel lived there. 

Samuel practiced his medicine in a kindly, skilful and unbusiness 
way. He was a man of remarkable lore and anecdote of his 
Traquair experience. He had a son, James Lewis Corbin Griffin, 
who was really the earl of Traquair. The family watched with 
interest the end of the lives of Lady Louisa and Lady Mary, and 
when the last, Lady Louisa, departed this life at Traquair, the 
question asked with bated breath was, “What of Traquair and the 
title ? Could the title come to a Virginian commoner ? Of course, 
the estates could if Lady Louisa willed it so!” 

Alas! the Lady Louisa, doubtless reinforced by her austere 
father’s indignation, did not mention her great-nephew in her 
will, but everything went to the Roman Catholic Church, of which 
she was a member, and the proud title became extinct. There was 
immediately effort made to prove that James Lewis Corbin Griffin 
was really the Earl of Traquair—“Traquair is Traquair” almost 
became a legend, like unto that famous announcement in that most 
delectable of children’s books: “Fauntleroy is Fauntleroy.” 

But there was no money to push the claim and James Lewis 
Corbin Griffin was merely a scholar and an antiquarian with the 
faith of the Universalist thrown in, and although he loved to talk 


140 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


of Traquair and his father’s life there with his grandfather, his 
uncles and his aunts, the possession of it would no doubt have 
mercilessly bored him. 

What a character he was! Super-educated, absolutely unprac¬ 
tical, dreamy, delightful, part French Huguenot, part Scotch, part 
Welsh, all Virginian, he read Greek and Hebrew, wrote poetry, 
professed Universalism and was tutor to a little Gloucester county 
girl. 

Away back in the distance she can hear the dulcet tones of his 
low voice; it was the voice of the grandson of an earl, verily, an 
earl himself. “Little Cousin”—the little cousin was then nine 
years old—“you are a Universalist; you don’t believe in hell: As 
in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” She who 
was once a little girl can even now see the reverence and the love 
upon the fine, chiseled face. 

That same little girl wrote compositions which were published in 
the Universalist Journal in New Orleans, of which James Lewis 
Corbin Griffin was an editor. She can still remember the thrill 
of seeing her own name in print; she can even now almost weep, 
as she wept then, when her family, her conventional, ultra-orthodox 
family, saw a seething hell in an Universalist paper, and stopped 
her innocent contributions; besides, they thought it rather unlady¬ 
like for a girl to be writing for publication, anyway. 

This grandson of an earl was a rare personality; there was 
nothing that he did not know; the culture of the Stuart-ages 
seemed to have descended unto him. There was nothing that he 
did not believe, except in hell; he suffered all things and forgave 
all things. His beautiful, teeming mind gave richly of its treasure; 
his big, simple heart went out in loving beauty to bird and beast 
and man. And yet, the best that he could do was to teach a little 
girl. He wrote with a quill pen, standing at his high escritoire, 
those endless things for the Universalist Journal , for which, prob¬ 
ably, he never received a cent; wrote them for the faith that was 
in him that in Christ should all be made alive. 

When the dinner bell rang, he would start from his room saying 
grace with all his might; he never completed it as he walked down 
the wide, long stairway; and he had to go out under the trees to 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


141 


finish thanking God, for what many would call, the tiny little bit 
that had been given him. His life went out gradually; no pomp or 
pageant attended the final ceremony for this grandson of an earl; 
instead, he could not be carried into a Christian church because he 
was an Unversalist. He now sleeps in old Abingdon church-yard, 
in Gloucester county, Va., the world forgetting, by the world forgot. 

Yet, perhaps, no earl of Traquair left behind him the record of 
so pure a life; his gospel was justice, mercy and love; and the 
love of the beautiful in literature, life and art, which he dispensed, 
must have lifted succeeding spirits from the sordid, groveling 
cares of life into his own translucent atmosphere. 

Many things make an earl. He, the last of Traquair, saw life 
in his vast ancestral acres, his staunch, storied castle, his noble 
daughters mating with noble men (?), his only son going on at 
Traquair with sons and daughters of his own. Alas, the fabric 
toppled with the escape of his most beautiful daughter from 
parental faith into the arms of a stalwart Virginian. Did God 
order it so? Did the Lady Christina, her son, Samuel and her 
grandson, James, shed such a spiritual light wherever they walked 
and conversed, as had never before emanated from the proud earls 
of proud Traquair? 

Was this the voice of the ages—the good of all the ages, uttered 
distinctly to Virginia? 



Village Street, Yorktown. 





John Custis: The Lover. 




John Custis: The Lover. 


J UST for fun, let us follow the life and career of old Daniel 
Parke’s other son-in-law, John Custis. We all know some¬ 
thing about the Eastern Shore of Virginia, that southern por¬ 
tion of a remarkable peninsula where names and customs go on 
from generation to generation without the slightest change. On 
the Eastern Shore, we are told, there is the purest Anglo-Saxon 
blood on the American continent, and that succeeding generations 
are as sturdy and strong as if it had not commingled for more than 
three hundred years, for soon after Jamestown was settled there 
were settlers on the Eastern Shore. 

One of the quaintest and most picturesque mansions in Virginia 
is Mount Custis, the home of the Custis family. John Custis, the 
immigrant, never lived there, but his daughter was the first Custis 
mistress, having married her cousin. Her father’s estate was 
known as Arlington, and it was ancestor of that other Arlington 
which lifts its pillared front so proudly on the Potomac today. 
From its embowering trees it is like the classic temple inviting 
worshippers. Those who go there bend the knee before two distinct 
shrines—one to its last citizen-master, Robert E. Lee; the others 
to their dead, most of whom fought against him. 

So intertwined are the Custises with the names of the Lees 
that the uninitiated might inquire who are these Custises, anyway; 
anything particularly distinguished or romantic about them? The 
John Custis of whose hectic romance we are going to write was 
the great-grandfather of Mrs. Robert E. Lee, and father-in-law 
of Mrs. Washington. He was John Custis, of Arlington, in 
Northampton county, and of the Custis house in Williamsburg. 
In the memory of man Custises still occupied that house. 


146 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


He fell madly in love with Frances Parke,sister of that gentle and 
affectionate Lucy, the first wife of William Byrd. Their father, as 
we have said before, was the dashing Daniel Parke, at one time 
bringing to the queen good news from Blenheim, at another so ques¬ 
tionably coquetting with Lucy Chester, of Antigua, that he had to 
leave her a large part of his great estate. John Custis was a man of 
parts and possessions, and at one time of his life occupied the 
dignified post of king’s counsellor in the government of Virginia. 

While Parke was disporting his handsome self in war and other 
less commendable ways, his wife and daughters, we are told, 
“lived in quiet seclusion.” Where? At Grandfather Ludwell’s? 
Thereby hangs a rather pretty tale. The Ludwells lived at famous 
“Greenspring,” not far from Jamestown. Its name suggests cool, 
pellucid water, around which ferns nestled, and over which beech 
trees caught their quivering reflection. Greenspring was projected 
by that proud aristocrat, Sir William Berkeley, he who was respon¬ 
sible for the haughty cavaliers who have left their proud record 
in Virginia’s archives. One chronicler asserts that the waters of 
the spring from which the historic place takes its name were “so 
very cold that ’tis dangerous drinking of them in summertime.” 

Berkeley’s home was worthy of the man. It was the true 
colonial; a popular central building with wings, giving to terraced 
lawn and gardens; it had outhouses, too, “where oranges grew.” 
He had a fine stud and grand stables and all other things that mark 
the luxurious aristocrat that he was. 

If only Greenspring were standing and could speak! Bewigged 
cavaliers, in all their consequent expectation, came to and went 
from Greenspring at their own sweet will. Berkeley was their 
arch-patron; they sat with him around those great fireplaces four 
feet wide and deep, and sketched the future of the Commonwealth. 

Ruffles and periwigs, smoke, of course, dogs, sprawling in the play 
of the blazes which danced in shining shoe buckles ! Fearless, elabo¬ 
rate talk, with a high-bred oath seasoning it anon. Once in a while 
Lady Frances would glide in—women glided in those feetless,ankle¬ 
less days—to see if the gentlemen were perfectly comfortable. 

Nathaniel Bacon, that temperamental hero, halted at Green¬ 
spring on his famous march from the Falls to Jamestown. Cannot 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


147 


we catch the echo of his young eloquence there today? How he 
conjured his hearts of gold, and how they melted into priceless 
patriotism as he spoke! 

After the death of her noble husband, Lady Frances Berkeley 
married the Honorable Philip Ludwell and welcomed him to her 
home, Greenspring, and at her death the Ludwells inherited it. 
She took Philip Ludwell for her second “wedded-husband,” but 
apparently, they had an antenuptial arrangement that, so long as 
she lived and forever afterward, she should be known as Lady 
Frances Berkeley. To allow the wife of his bosom to go by a 
lordly predecessor’s name was nothing to Philip Ludwell in the 
face of Greenspring. Men hunted fortunes that day as well as 
now; human nature keeps the same highways from generation to 
generation and a rich widow was a colonial prize, and a rich 
widow is still a prize, which has not lost its value. So Ludwell 
did not insist upon his name if he received the land and the ap¬ 
purtenances thereof. 

Mrs. Parke was a Ludwell and, perhaps, Greenspring was the 
seclusion in which she and Frances and Lucy lived till the two 
daughters were married. There is a wonderful dinner table in 
Williamsburg at which many of us have dawdled and talked of 
the Berkeleys and the Ludwells and the Paradises (was there ever 
so imposing and consoling a surname?) ; for the table belonged to 
the Paradises, and Mrs. Paradise was a Ludwell, and Mr. Paradise 
was a friend of Dr. Johnson—witness the mention of him by Bos¬ 
well—and Dr. Johnson as well as ourselves dined off that beautiful 
mahogany table. 

Whatever were the characteristics of the wife of Daniel Parke, 
we see her as demure as a kitten and as obedient as Saint Paul 
would have her be, but she had a vixenish and beautiful daughter 
of the name Frances. John Custis fell desperately in love with 
her; no doubt she was fascinating, as pretty vixens are apt to be, 
and Frances, appears on the records as “beautiful in form and 
feature and one of two heirs to a great fortune.” 

William Byrd had his “doots” and his trials about that fortune, 
remember? However, John Custis would have her; she was flirta¬ 
tious, we dare say, and gave John Custis sleepless nights and 


148 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


troubled days. His friends begged him to let Frances alone. He 
turned a deaf ear; he would tame her. They warned him that 
she would worry the life of the unfortunate man who would win 
her fickle heart. John Custis would see to that. Men are ever 
so: they will see to this and that, to everything beforehand, but 
afterward they are likely to be hasty if this and that are not exactly 
what they wish them to be. 

We can never tell whether Frances was impossible, or whether 
John, having won her, just like a man, decided to have her go his 
way and not hers, and she objected. We can never tell now. Ac¬ 
cording to history they had a blissful early honeymoon, but soon 
afterward began to think painfully in opposition to each other. In 
their love-making days he called her Fidelia; evidently a mislead¬ 
ing epithet in the light of later times. She called him Veramour. 
He writes from his house in Williamsburg, February 4, 1705, about 
the time that William Byrd married her sister, Lucy. 

“May angels guard my dearest Fidelia, and deliver her safe 
to my arms at our next meeting; and sure they won’t refuse their 
protection to a creature so pure and charming that it would be easy 
for them to take her for one of themselves. If you would but 
believe how entirely you possess my heart, you would easily credit 
me, when I tell you that I cannot think or so much as dream of 
any other subject than the enchanting Fidelia. 

“You will do me wrong if you suspect that ever was a man 
created that loved with more tenderness and sincerity than I do, 
and I should do you wrong if I could imagine that there ever was 
a nymph that deserved it better than you. Take this for granted, 
and then fancy how uneasy I am like to be under the unhappiness 
of your absence. 

“Figure to yourself what tumults there will arise in my blood, 
what a fluttering of the spirits, what a disorder of the pulse, what 
passionate wishes, what absence of thought, what crowding of 
sighs—and then imagine how unfit I shall be for business.” 

Do they write so now? Oh, young female innocent, or young 
female vixen, if they do—beware! 

He goes on, wildly and rhapsodically: “But returning to the 
dear cause of my uneasiness, Oh, the torture of six months’ expec- 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


149 


tation! If it must be so long and necessity will, till then, interpose 
betwixt you and my expectations, I must submit, though it be as 
unwilling as pride submits to superior virtue, or envy to superior 
success. Pray think of me and believe that Veramour is entirely 
and eternally yours—Adieu. 

“I pray you write as soon as you receive this and commit your 
letter to the same trusty hand that brings you this.” 

Off rides the negro boy on a thoroughbred, through the leafy 
lanes from Williamsburg to Greenspring and the pretty vixen 
reads the words hot from her lover’s heart, and she, with flowing 
curls, or formal coiffure, sits at her “escritoire,” purses her pretty 
lips, takes up her quill pen and tries to match his burning senti¬ 
ment. Did she tease him with a touch of humor, a dash of doubt, 
or a quiet, temperate, virginal answer? 

Back the boy races to Williamsburg and nobody can tell us 
whether or not Veramour was pleased with his Fidelia’s note. 

They were married, but they fell out soon after the honeymoon 
and continued hostile to the day of his death. 

She would not do what he wanted her to do; she was a vixen 
before and she was a vixen now. When he told her to do things 
and she wouldn’t, he tried all sorts of discipline; this pure and 
charming creature that the angels were apt to think one of them¬ 
selves shewed herself absolutely unafraid of her Veramour. 

“Fidelia! do so and so!” or perhaps, just “Frances!” 

“I will not, Mr. Custis!” 

“You shall.” 

“I shall not.” 

He was driving one day close to the Chesapeake Bay, for he had 
an estate on the Eastern Shore as well as in Williamsburg. He 
requested her to do something. She refused. “I will drive into the 
water and drown you if you do not comply with my request, 
Fidelia (or Frances).” 

“I will not do it!” Veramour no longer; certainly, Mr. Custis. 

Into the rough water plunged the horses! 

“Will you do it?” 

“No.” 


150 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


Deeper and deeper into the stream. The water is now to the 
horses’ knees ! Now to their bodies. Now it flows into the vehicle, 
wetting the slim feet of Fidelia. “Will you do it?” 

“No!” 

On they go, the water runs in higher and higher. 

“Will you do it?” 

“No!” 

“See, the water is getting deep. It is very dangerous. You 
will drown!” 

“Drive on, Mr. Custis!” was the angel-Fidelia’s uncompromis¬ 
ing reply. 

“Drive on, Mr. Custis!” No womanish compromise, no threat of 
injury could coerce Fidelia; she was game, the little vixen; she 
defied Mr. Custis as well as the waves, and he turned the carriage 
and drove back to the shore, his Fidelia having, apparently, gotten 
the best of him. 

Things did not improve for the Custises, although they had two 
children, Daniel Parke, who married Martha Dandridge, and 
Fanny. The latter married a Mr. Winch, who must have found 
her as difficult as John Custis found her mother, for he discreetly 
left her without further complications and lived in London. He 
had the last fling at her in his will, leaving her nothing and excus¬ 
ing himself for the reason that “he never could get Mr. Custis to 
make any marriage settlements.” 

One is prone to revert to colonial times as a span of halcyon 
days filled with courtiers on bended knees, the fruits of rich virgin 
lands, farthingales and crinoline, coaches and postillions and 
minuets. Alas, they were days like our own days where personal 
idiosyncrasies could make men and women very miserable, and 
where tempers, as now, broke up the domestic happiness of 
Veramours and Fidelias. 

Our angel-Fidelia departed her troubled life twenty-four years 
before her husband, John, but death did not soften his sense of 
marital injury; his keen disappointment in his love affair went with 
him to the grave. 


Love Stories of Famous Virginians 


151 


Poor Fidelia died of smallpox, as did her sister, Mrs. William 
Byrd, and as she died young, one would think he must have for¬ 
given her anything. But John determined that future ages should 
read in imperishable marble that his life was absolutely ruined by 
matrimony. He wrote his own epitaph, and commanded his heir 
to have it inscribed on his tombstone “at the place of his burial.” 

His son, Daniel Parke, had it done and it must have gone against 
the grain of that exemplary and kindly fellow, for, remember, 
Frances Parke, called by her lover, Fidelia, was his own dear 
mother ! Thus reads the famous inscription: 


UNDER THIS MARBLE TOMB LIES 
THE BODY OF THE 

HON. JOHN CUSTIS, ESQ., 

OF THE 

City of Williamsburg and Parish of Bruton, formerly of 
Hungar Parish, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia 
and County of Northampton. 

Aged Seventy-one years, 

AND YET LIVED BUT SEVEN YeARS, WHICH WAS THE SPACE OF 

Time he kept a Bachelor's Home at Arlington, on the 
Eastern Shore of Virginia. 


Poor Fidelia going to dust, and Veramour announcing, not only 
to his present, but to all succeeding ages, that from the moment 
he ceased to be a bachelor until his death, at the ripe age of three¬ 
score and eleven, he was practically dead, his heart and spirit 
killed, by the unreasonable vagaries of an angel-Fidelia. 

He was an unforgiving old gentleman, to say the least of it, 
and what did poor Fidelia really do to merit such memorial indig¬ 
nation? Did she stick her teeth in the mahogany bedpost as one 
dame of her time really did? No, it was something much more 
cutting to the husband’s pride, much more humiliating to his high 
estate. She defied him; she went her own gait, at the time when 
Virginia wives were always “broken in” to their husbands. He 
wanted her to say she was sorry, perhaps, and she wouldn’t. Fidelia 
was a vixen, we are told, and vixens have a maddening way of 
upsetting the equilibrium of husbands. 










LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



0 014 442 609 5 
















































































































































































































































































































































































































